The Future of Documents

Vacation are great, but you sometimes miss important news like this one.

Canon recently announced the acquisition of 17% of IRIS group SA. IRIS is a well known player in Intelligent Document Recognition, but also to some extent in Entreprise Content Management. Canon and IRIS had started their relationship around IRIS’s latest scanning software suite, which is used for electronic archiving and compression.

This is another example of a traditional hardware (print and scan-) company moving into document management solutions, and enabling a tighter connection between their Multi-Function Devices / scanners and their customer’s paper-intensive workflows. The next logical step might be, just like Xerox Global Services, to strengthen its Services offering beyond simple Managed Print Services, into Pofessional Document and Business Process Services, including generic Imaging and Document Management Services, or more specialized services such as Client Acquisition and Lifecycle Management, Finance and Administration Services, or Mortgage Services.

It is interesting to compare with Océ, who moved the opposite direction by selling its Océ Document Technologies to Captaris about 1.5 years back.

So, which model is right – Océ moving away, or Xerox, and gradually Canon, moving into Document Management and Business Process Services? Time will tell – I have an idea, but I might be biased

In the latest version of Gartner’s Managed Print Service Quadrant, Xerox is positioned in the leaders quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period.

This is a owing to the Xerox Office Services offering, which helps your organization gain control of processes and costs for document output. Xerox manages all of your office printing devices – such as printers, copiers, and fax machines – regardless of manufacturer or model. Productivity, cost savings, but also carbon footprint keep improving through the continuous improvements that your fleet is undergoing.

In other words, a key contributor to the Less Paper Office, which is supported by a mix of people, processes, and bleeding edge technologies, but also cool research like social networking for printers.

An interesting article in the New York Times on Xerox and the Paperless / “Less Paper” Office. 

Technologies mentioned include Extensible Interface Platform, or the direct access to workflows from the Multi-Function Device, Xerox Mortgage Services, Xerox Litigation Services. The only advanced research project mentioned is “Intelligent Redaction“, a PARC technology which controls access to sensitive information.

Also interesting is the mention that Xerox has joined the Information Overload Research Group, an organization in charge of “reducing information pollution” and lists things like feeds, voice mail, social networks, interruptions, blogs, Web 2.0 services and search engines as “polluters”.