By Mark Davison at Ricoh’s Freedom to Operate Press Tour, London – Ricoh could have a major jump on some less traditional rivals when it comes to the new style of IT that will rely heavily on cloud computing – it already has more data centres in Europe than most other vendors.
Cloud computing is touted by most IT vendors as one of the pillars of the future of IT and is heavily reliant on massive data centres to be able to comfortably supply various services. And while many traditional vendors have adequate data centres in the US, Europe has been sadly neglected in this area.
It was only in the past few months, for example, that Oracle announced it would establish a data centre in the UK specifically to cater for its European cloud services.
Ricoh, better known for its printers and copiers than it is for cloud computing, has not only one data centre in Europe: it has three.
Quizzed on the sidelines of varied demonstrations yesterday about just how Ricoh would cope with cloud services, the company’s MD of Marketing, Chas Moloney revealed that it had two data centres in the UK and a third in the Netherlands which was used mainly as a disaster recovery site.
And Ricoh has, of course, one of the biggest data centres in the world in its homeland of Japan.
So while some competitors may pooh-pooh the entrance of “a printer company” into what some consider their domain, it seems that Ricoh could already have the upper hand – when it comes to data centres anyway.