Buoyed by legal and other business drivers Fujitsu Canada Inc. is releasing the ScanSnap S300 as a scanning solution for remotely backing up images off site.
The new product has the world’s smallest colour, automatic document feeder scanner, Fujitsu claims.
The ScanSnap has also shrunk from previous incarnations with a hope that its may now be an option for the desktop.
“It has been designed to sit on the desk,” said John Hay, national sales and marketing manager, Imaging Products, for Fujitsu Canada, based in Mississauga, Ont.
Hay added that beyond the design of the product the ScanScap is meant to improve Improve credit trails for regulatory compliance and reduce waste.
The target markets are lawyers, accountants, doctors and administrative assistants.
For individuals people can scan bills, receipts, recipes and share information electronically to save space. Other documents such as wills, photos, and policies can now be stored on CD in the advent of a flood or other natural disaster, he said.
For sales professionals on the road, the ScanSnap is ultraportable and can enable a user to feed in his or her expenses and have them automatically sent to the office for processing instead of waiting for when the return to the company.
Real estate agents can also use the ScanSnap for obtaining signatures that are official.
Even truckers are using the ScanSnap, Hay said, for billing and tracking documents.
The product comes with a standard version of OrganizeMY Electronic Filing Cabinet for Dummies from Org-Matters Solutions Inc.
“This reduces the print cycles and pushes the environmental trend of reducing paper, paper use and paper waste,” Hay said.
He added that more companies are pushing the paperless office. For years the paperless office has been considered a myth, but Hay believes it is now a trend.
Between 2004 and 2005, the University of California at Berkley studied people’s consumption of information and found that within these two years there was more information produced than the previous history of mankind.
“This is the information age,” Hay said.
Meanwhile, InfoTrend published a report stating that the scanner market will hit double digit growth in the next five years, while the rest of the category (flat-beds for example) will remain flat.
Other trends will see the network attached scanner that is in a shared workgroup environment similar to faxes, but will be used as a communications tool, said Steve Oblin, marketing manager, Imaging & Printer Products for Fujitsu Canada.
The fi-6000NS network scanner is Fujitsu’s first foray into the category. It has scan to email functions along with a full size keyboard and large touch screen for previews.
“We tried to do it right the first time. In the past users found it difficult to write an email on a dirty screen,” Oblin said.
Fujitsu goes direct to resellers with its products. They have about 800 partners signed up for its Partner To Win program.
“We like to be in a position where it is win, win, win for all groups. The VAR bring the value add to the customer. Everybody looks out for price, but these products need the value add,” Oblin said.
Another partner program the Advantage Program enables VARs to register opportunities online with Fujitsu.
Typically the reseller may get between 10 to 20 per cent margins or higher depending on the solution, he added.
