The following was written by Brian Bissett and appears in The MFP Report
The emergence of the cloud as “the next big thing” in computing is helping rewrite lots of old assumptions about how people and companies work and communicate. Albeit belatedly and by no means completely, one particularly positive outcome of this 
phenomenon in the hardcopy world is that vendors are applying tough lessons learned from past failed software battles to their evolving business plans for leveraging MFPs and the cloud. Still, it’s too soon to tell whether these lessons have been fully internalized.
Just to be clear, I’m referring to the dynamic we’ve seen over the past decade, when many MFP vendors sought to develop their own docu- ment solutions. For some companies, it’s been a simple case of trying to copy what software partners have developed and successfully sold. In other cases, it’s been a wholesale effort by MFP makers to create a parallel universe of branded document management software and ancillary applications. Think of Canon’s huge investment in all of the pieces of its imageWARE suite.
More recently, MFP vendors have shifted and even accelerated investments toward their own scan connectors and print management tools. It finally seemed to sink in a couple of years ago among these companies that they weren’t destined for greatness with their own content management wares. For the most part, MFP vendors since then have backpedalled on developing and promoting their own comprehensive content management platforms. Lexmark is the contrarian of sorts, but even they realize the goal requires buying software, not making it.
A lot of what’s happened also reflects a pro- nounced geographic and cultural divide that still exists among the Japanese vendors. Clearly, the impetus for investing in comprehensive content management software came from corporate headquarters. And resistance to these same applications and pressure instead to develop more utilitarian scan and print tools has ema- nated from US and European sales companies.
The net result has been that, even though a few MFP companies still have aspirations (or delusions) of becoming big players in content management, the ECM industry long ago passed them by, and users ignore their mediocre wares.
And then came the cloud. While most US and European MFP sales companies see cloud com- puting ushering in a new era of more sophisti- cated scan and print connectivity for future MFPs, some of the same teams back in Japan see the cloud as their last best chance to stake a claim in the document repository business.
Ricoh represents both the worst and the best of this evolution. Just as Ricoh sought to grab its
piece of the document management pie with the poorly conceived and weakly executed eCabinet solution in the late 1990s, Ricoh sought to get its share of the cloud storage business with the Quanp site it launched in Japan in 2008. Ricoh even quietly beta tested 
Quanp in the US from 2009 to 2011. It wasn’t so much that Quanp was badly designed. It was more that the service was superfluous to the cloud market, incidental to Ricoh’s business, and devoid of any marketing. Ricoh finally closed Quanp in Japan on July 31.
The good news is that Ricoh has learned from this experience. Even though its new ICE cloud offering has arrived way behind schedule and is more confusing than it ought to be, ICE is no Quanp redux. Rather than trying to duplicate what a dozen other cloud-centered companies already do much better and more successfully, Ricoh with ICE is trying to leverage the success of those services by making it easier to scan to them and print from them.
Of course, Ricoh Americas still has not come to terms with the role and rationale for Document-Mall, its own quirky content-in-the-cloud conglomeration. Likewise, Xerox for some reason still has a soft spot in its corporate head and heart for the erstwhile DocuShare, which is in- creasingly pitched as a cloud-ish solution.
Meanwhile, other MFP vendors in Japan have their heads up in the cloud. They still dream of differentiating and monetizing their own cloud repositories and software platforms. Fuji Xerox launched its Working Folder cloud offering in Japan last year and has rolled it out across Asia and Oceania. The company is also expanding its SkyDesk cloud-based suite of business applications for SMB. And last year also saw Sharp debut its Sharpdesk Online cloud service in Japan.
In other cases, vendors are making the push for a branded cloud in other geographies. Canon Europe has been beta testing its Project1709 photo and image repository for a year; and a few months ago, Konica Minolta announced its KM Document Genius cloud solution in Canada.
Maybe there’s a path MFP vendors must follow without any detour. Perhaps each must try and fail with its own full-blown cloud service or platform. Only then can a company focus on a more achievable goal, and target the key areas where it has a defensible position in the cloud. That means doing a great job to help users scan to and print from every credible cloud service. But will the market and users wait for their arrival?
