Canon Wide Format

By Andy Slawetsky – On Tuesday I visited Canon USA at their HQ in Melville NY to find out What’s Happenin’ with one of the imaging industry’s perennial leaders.

Since Toyo Kuwamura, EVP and GM of Canon’s Business Imaging Solutions Group (BISG), was promoted to this role at the beginning of March, Canon USA has already become more outgoing and forthcoming with news and information and it’s been noticeable. An upcoming multi-city road show will take Canon’s technology to the field to help spread the word to imaging dealers. The road show will be held in Melville NY, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.

Canon HQ

I started my meetings with VP/GM Dennis Amorosano and Director Brian Dollard where we discussed Canon USA’s distribution. 80 branches and 400 dealers (give or take) have kept Canon humming along over the years.


Click here to view all my photos


Dennis told me the “Canon had an unbelievable year last year in production.” New hardware and workflow from both Canon and Océ have Canon crushing it. Cut sheet production growth has been double digit for the last 4/5 years and it keeps growing. They are outpacing the market every year.

Dennis Amorosano

The conversion of offset to digital remains Canon’s biggest opportunity and the i300 press is just starting to roll out. The ones they’ve placed are doing “even better than expected.” They truly feel they’re just scratching the tip of the iceberg with the offset to digital conversion.

Thomas O'Neill

VP/GM Hiro Imamura, director Tom O’Neill and Steve Pearl joined us for a bit and we chatted about Canon’s technology and linking hardware to workflow solutions, Enterprise sales, cloud, partners, social media strategy and more. Quite enlightening. Keep on eye on Canon’s Therefore ECM technology. Like uniFLOW, it’s becoming a critical piece of Canon’s go-forward workflow strategy.

Hiro Imamura

I then chatted with VP Greg Ryan from Canon Information Imaging Solutions (CIIS). CIIS is a group within Canon that has about 140 employees, over half of which are developers and software engineers. They were formed in 2011 to accelerate Canon’s solutions business. Two big focuses of this group are Healthcare and automation of AP processes.

After my meetings I had a chance to walk around their showroom. It was pretty amazing seeing so much of what Canon does under one roof. Medical diagnostic equipment, cameras, video and of course copiers and printers. It’s surprising that there is almost no high end production equipment in this show room but those do really need to be in a properly vented production facility so I guess it’s understandable.

I had a quick but informative trip to Melville and I greatly appreciate Canon USA taking the time to let me know What’s Happenin’ at HQ!

~Andy


44-inch wide powerhouse printing system designed