Feature Articles

I’ve been speaking to a number of dealers over the last couple of weeks and have been asked a number of questions regarding the financial stability of Sharp, as if I would know the answer to that question. Apparently, there’s been a lot of talk circulating, rumors mostly, about Read More

It’s been approximately seven years since I’ve written about what dealers expect from their manufacturers. Even when many of those expectations are expected it’s still good to have someone else validate what you already know. It only reaffirms what’s important and what continues Read More

When is the right time to take another look at reman color toner?  Where can you obtain unbiased data to assess the risk/benefit of the current market opportunity?  What is your risk profile for exploring emerging opportunities? These are important questions to independent Read More

As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile, so does technology. That’s true whether you’re talking hardware or software, and nowhere is that more evident of late than in the world of office technology. Hardware manufacturers are releasing apps that enable printing from anywhere Read More

(Editor’s note: This is the second installment of an article I wrote that originally appeared last summer in Independent Dealer magazine www.idealercentral.com. It offers some perspectives that all dealers should pay attention to within the competitive MPS landscape.) After Read More

  For many of us or maybe just me, the news on Aug. 5 that Nevill Business Machines in Carrolton, Texas has been acquired by Kyocera Document Solutions America was a shocker. Nevill has been a perennial Elite Dealer and a high-profile Kyocera dealership thanks in large part Read More

John Givens, founder and chairman of Source Office Products, might not be providing his customers with managed print services (MPS) today if he hadn’t already had a service department in place repairing laser printers. “That isn’t typical for most office supply companies,” Read More

Last year David Evans left ABBYY, the company focused on document recognition, document capture, and linguistic technologies and services, and within a month had launched Leafdoc, a new company, based on the outskirts of London, that offers an online OCR service along with Read More

Resellers looking for a document management solution have plenty of options. Since 2010 there’s been another option worth considering from MaxxVault LLC, a company that provides electronic document management solutions for small, medium, and large companies in various vertical Read More

This story doesn’t take place in a galaxy far, far away, but in Dallas at the Sharp annual dealer meeting, July 15-18. When you’re #2 or wherever you are on the pie chart, you need to try harder and Sharp is doing exactly that as the company and new Sharp President Doug Albregts Read More

Remember Crazy Eddie whose prices were insane? If you’re from the East Coast you may, if not this video is the perfect introduction. Either way, this video blast from the past is a hoot. And that brings us to the final installment of this three part series on the greatest threats Read More

Don’t look now, but the paperless office has arrived and it’s in large part thanks to cloud-based document storage solutions that the paperless office has grown in size and you can now access documents from wherever you want. One of the emerging players in the world of online Read More

Last week Andrew Ritschel, president of Electronic Office Systems (EOS) in Fairfield, New Jersey, shared his thoughts on the three biggest threats to the independent dealer. As a point of clarification, he e-mailed me to say that these threats affect not only independent dealers Read More

If you’re looking for a roadmap of how to evolve your dealership to thrive and survive in the 21st century, look no further than Marco (www.marconet.com), a Minnesota-based dealership that has transformed themselves into a provider of networked solutions. The employee-owned Read More

I can always count on Andrew Ritschel, president of Electronic Office Systems (EOS) in Fairfield, New Jersey, to tell it like it is, and not only that, encourage me to print it. That’s always an offer I can’t refuse so when he e-mailed recently wanting to talk about the three Read More