Ricoh App2Me Moves Ricoh into the Cloud Computing Age

Cloud computing for businesses

Businesses are constantly changing and adapting to market forces and new technology, among other things.  One of the big trends right now is cloud computing, software as a service and cloud services. According to Gartner Research, cloud computing is a form of outsourcing, by which vendors supply computing services to lots of customers over the Internet. For those of us who want a simple answer it means renting (instead of buying) software services.

Most of the renting is done between one corporation and another, but such renting frequently occurs within a company as well. Inside a corporation it may be the IT group that is responsible for running the software, and the business units that pay an internal tax to use the business critical solutions they provide. The important point is that no matter where your software comes from, there are two ways to access the information:

1) the user front-end ( usually a url on a browser, or a widget on a mobile device) or
2) via technical web APIs (application programming interfaces).

Web APIs are the way software services are programmed to talk directly to each other, without a human in the loop. Users most commonly see these APIs presented in website “mash-ups” like housingmaps.com  where the Google Maps API receives information on housing the users is interested in and presents them on a Google Map.

Ricoh’s Cloud Computing Move: App2Me Announcement

App2Me is a new way to connect Ricoh’s Multi Function Printers (MFPs) with web-based business solutions, digital services, desktop and mobile apps.  Ricoh announced the App2Me solution at the Google Enterprise Day in Tokyo at the beginning of November 2009 (see the press release here). At this event, they also demonstrated how easy it is to scan documents to Google Docs using App2Me powered MFPs and desktop widgets (small light weight desktop apps). Ricoh plans to start providing App2Me business productivity solutions in mid-January 2010 at its App2Me store.

 
App2Me Background: Customer Driven Innovation

Ricoh Innovations noticed the power of web services and web APIs some years ago and began studying how we could increase customer value by allowing Ricoh’s line of MFP copiers to act as web services (e.g., Print, Scan, etc.) so they could be combined with other web services to create powerful and easy to use workflow solutions directly from an easy to use widget on a users networked PC or mobile device. This idea has been turned into a standard offering on Ricoh’s workgroup line of MFP copiers at the beginning January 2010 and is known as App2Me.

Ricoh Innovations (RII) actively researches digital services and the powerful solutions that can be created between devices (MFPs + PC + Mobile Phones, etc.). We are pleased to have contributed to Ricoh’s App2Me breakthrough and look forward to collecting success stories on how large corporations are using the power of App2Me to create their own widgets to speed office workflows .  Ricoh Americas is planning to support App2Me developers through a developer program beginning early next year.  If you are a Ricoh customer and you are interested in potential research with Ricoh Innovations, please visit  our Customer Research Center to learn more.

Ricoh Innovations continues to study with digital services and is eager to work with companies and find new valuable solutions for mobile professionals with PCs and Smartphones.  Please visit Ricoh at Dreamforce 2009 (Nov 17-20) at Moscone Center in San Francisco to see the new Salesforce Assistant App2Me widget  in action. It allows documents to be scanned from a Ricoh device and automatically placed in Salesforce.com via a small desktop widget users can configure themselves.

Interested in learning more about App2Me?

In this blog we plan to have many articles and videos from the leaders of App2Me explaining the App2Me solutions and how it will help to our customers. Also, through this web site, our research center plans to make many beta-level App2Me applications available for trials.

If you like to receive updates on our articles and be notified when App2Me beta-apps are available please sign-up here.