Ricoh Co. has announced a global strategic alliance with IBM. The alliance will provide customers with comprehensive document solutions leveraging Ricoh and IBM's vast capabilities to address customers' business problems.
As part of the alliance, the companies will first launch a new Ricoh offering, Document Security and Management Services (DSMS) in the United States. This product is for documenting workflow, security and compliance, while reducing the total cost of ownership of office equipment investment and advancing environmental sustainability practices. The DSMS offering includes Assessment & Deployment, End User Services, Managed Services, Security, Green Office and Enterprise Content Management services, which will be delivered by Ricoh Document Solutions and Services Division and IBM's Global Technology Services. In addition, Ricoh has an agreement to resell IBM's Managed Server offering and collaborate on the sale and delivery of IBM software, hardware and services, such as End User Services, Internet Security Systems (ISS) Services, Business Continuity & Resiliency Services, and Storage & Data Services.
Ricoh and IBM have signed an agreement to demonstrate Multi-Function Product (MFP) -based solutions that fully integrate with a corporation's IT applications and infrastructure and are based on the principles of service oriented architecture (SOA).. Because of its support for SOA, customers will be able to integrate a Ricoh MFP into their existing IT infrastructure to drive complex business processes, create a custom portal on the MFP panel and receive messages at the MFP. The MFP extends SOA environments to help drive efficiencies and lower IT costs.
An SOA-enabled Ricoh MFP facilitates the integration of other new technologies including autonomic computing that proactively alerts customers when a problem arises so they can resolve it before failure of the device occurs. Also, by integrating supply chain management systems with diagnostic data generated within the MFP, the ability to automatically order MFP supplies can be performed.
