Ricoh has been placed in Gartner’s managed print and content services leader 2014 Magic Quadrant for the fifth consecutive year.
This year’s Magic Quadrant goes beyond Managed Print Services (MPS) to include Managed Content Services (MCS), which Gartner defines as a comprehensive solution that rationalises, streamlines and optimises business communications by providing customers with consultative help, software, and implementation.
“This accolade from Gartner is a result of our focus on managed document services (MDS),” says Jacques van Wyk, COO at Ricoh SA.
“MDS is the focal point of our strategy to become a services-based business, a strategy we are deploying aggressively in South Africa. Ricoh began researching and developing this approach to market over a decade ago and has been actively rolling it out at the various operating companies around the globe, including South Africa, for the past three years.
“Commoditisation of the imaging product market has led us to this juncture and, while imaging still forms an integral part of our business, particularly in the form of our indirect channel operations and the partnerships we established in that environment, we must look to MDS-based services for the lion’s share of our future growth.”
According to Gartner: “Leaders provide MPS and MCS to a wide range of customers, including the largest and most geographically dispersed, so they must demonstrate a truly global reach.
“They must demonstrate not only the skills to deliver today’s MPS and MCS, but also the understanding, initiative and resources to prepare for tomorrow’s MPS and MCS. Leaders characteristically augment the full scope of MPS with a wide range of added-value services.”
Ricoh MDS optimises and manages an organisation’s print and electronic information infrastructure. By conducting an in-depth analysis of how the company accesses, uses and stores both print and electronic information, Ricoh identifies inefficiencies in the capture, transformation and management of information, then builds a strategy to address customers’ specific issues, including document process and print device optimisation.
Ricoh service teams then implement the solution and help customers manage the resulting changes. Ultimately, these services from Ricoh enable customers to get more value out of information by making it more available, adaptable, searchable, intelligible, portable and reusable.