The following appears on TheImagingChanel.com by Patricia Ames
The Imaging Channel had the opportunity to sit down with Toshiba America Business Solutions President and CEO Scott Maccabe and have a fascinating discussion involving buffaloes, unicorns, big stadium deals and the changing world of information consumption. Join me in the SpeakEasy.
We both graduated from the same University — University of Colorado, Boulder. Go Buffs! What was your major?
Molecular Biology. It was a great school and there was a lot of excellent skiing involved.
I will admit that I had more fun than I should have, but I did graduate with an economics degree, so let’s talk a little about the economics of our industry. How would you assess your first year at Toshiba as President and CEO?
I think that fortunately I’ve been at the reins when our organization is really on the uptick and doing well.
It’s a nice curve!
Yes! We’ve been successful in MPS. We’ve been successful now for two years in digital signage. This last year, we’ve really had a focus on digital signage and we’ve been supporting it, and I think that’s been very successful. In addition, the depth of the relationship that we’ve been able to develop with Japan corporate has grown exponentially. Toshiba Corporation has two investigative investment arms – one in Japan and one in the U.S. In my previous role, I was a part of the U.S. investment arm. We took positions in several emerging technology companies. Now that I am overseeing Toshiba America Business Solutions I am able to create a bridge between our companies and leverage the investment holdings to find applications in our market. There is now an entirely different level of sensitivity within Toshiba corporate and my parent company, Toshiba Tec Corporation because I was able to create that bridge. Headquarters has realized that our dealer partners have access to hundreds of thousands of customers in all kinds of vertical markets. Toshiba has a large array of solutions that could be brought to our market. There’s a huge amount of energy from Toshiba corporate now pushing this at the Chairman and President level.
Are you seeing some trends in the channel?
There is definitely a push towards solutions. As an example, Toshiba is investing in data analytics development companies and also has a cloud company that is developing storage-based cloud solutions. We’re now holding meetings where corporate is asking us how we can take these solutions to the market, because they are the R&D organization and don’t have the paths to the market that we do. We are now aligned to do that.
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