Office systems undergoing big changes

BOSTON - You might think you've heard about every possible security vulnerability in your network, but what about your copiers?

"Network-connected output devices are becoming an absolute primary target of people, foreign and domestic, who are penetrating networks," said Jim Joyce, senior vice president for office services at Xerox Global Services. "Many of them are large devices with large disk drives, with a fair amount of memory and are network-connected and are not secure. This laptop [I'm using for this presentation] is probably 10 times more secure than any of the output devices we have in our environments today."

Joyce, speaking at the two-day Office Document Solutions conference in Boston last week, was among a number of presenters who implored makers of printers, copiers, scanners and other such devices to start thinking about more than just selling boxes to customers.

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BOSTON - You might think you've heard about every possible security vulnerability in your network, but what about your copiers?

"Network-connected output devices are becoming an absolute primary target of people, foreign and domestic, who are penetrating networks," said Jim Joyce, senior vice president for office services at Xerox Global Services. "Many of them are large devices with large disk drives, with a fair amount of memory and are network-connected and are not secure. This laptop [I'm using for this presentation] is probably 10 times more secure than any of the output devices we have in our environments today."

Joyce, speaking at the two-day Office Document Solutions conference in Boston last week, was among a number of presenters who implored makers of printers, copiers, scanners and other such devices to start thinking about more than just selling boxes to customers.

Joyce said during an interview after his speech that Xerox has poured about $20 million in recent years into technologies to better manage office and document systems and is putting a particular emphasis on security these days. He noted that some machines, such as multifunction devices, might have several operating systems in them that could provide security holes if not protected.

Look for Xerox in the months ahead to deliver more in the way of technologies that would enable document systems to be able to identify content so that companies can better prevent theft of intellectual property and other confidential data. Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center has been working on such technologies, Joyce said.

Meanwhile, other office document-product vendors said they seek to go beyond selling boxes.

While "solutions" might qualify as the single-most overused word in the IT industry over the years, presenters embraced it as a fresh concept capable of bringing new life to their industry.

Charles Pesko, a director at InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, greeted attendees at the consulting and research firm's event by stating that the U.S. copier market is maturing and that solutions are the answer to revenue growth. Not only do solutions - in the form of software, support and maintenance - offer revenue opportunities, but vendors that succeed here also will see a rise in hardware sales. For every dollar in solutions sold, a company will sell $4 or $5 of hardware with it, he said.

"A lot of people just don't get that yet," he said.

Among the biggest opportunities are document capture and creation, document management and document output management, said Joel Mazza, another InfoTrends/CAP Ventures director.

A panel of vendor representatives from Konica Minolta, Ricoh, Toshiba America Business Solutions and Sharp Electronics agreed that solutions are the way to go. However, they said it is difficult to change overnight given that the hardware business is worth tens of billions of dollars a year, whereas the solutions market is a sliver of that. Most of them said they are not making money on solutions so far, but consider their efforts in software, support and more as an investment that will pay off in the long run.