Magazine

Diversity, as well as consistency, continues to rule among the Big Six independent dealer community in the number of leasing partners they are aligned with. For the…

This is the fifth consecutive year we have asked dealers to identify the companies””excluding the hardware manufacturers and leasing companies””that provide…

As we did last year for the first time, we continue to gauge dealer optimism and pessimism in three areas””A3, A4, and production print. Not every dealer offered…

One of the nice things about visiting dealers in Baltimore, at least for us, is that we can drive or take a train. Carol and I elected to drive, and CJ took the train from…

he first time I called on Advanced Business Systems in Cockeysville, Maryland, 45 years ago, I was a DSM for Saxon Industries. I remember meeting the owners…

We have many traditions in the Marine Corps, as do the other units of the armed services. One that has appealed to me most is recognizing individuals by the name of…

The Cannata Report will close out a year marked by substantial travel with a visit to Toshiba’s U.S. headquarters in Irvine, CA, to meet with the manufacturer’s…

Thank you, Bill Gates, for turning me onto “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari. After reading Gates’ front-page review in The New York Times…

Jeff Gau Ties the Knot; Marco Rocks Technology Tradeshow; Seton Hall Honors Frank Cannata; and SDG and BTA Take a Bite out of the Big Apple…

The performance of Toshiba TEC (Toshiba’s copier operating company) remains strong. In fiscal year 2017, operating profit, ordinary profit, and…

Pretty much all customers want to strike a bargain when it comes to spending money on their printing. They ask for the best possible device price, only want to…

Any doubts regarding the viability of inkjet in the production print space were quickly dispelled at the thINK 2018 Conference, September 5″“7 in Boca Raton, FL…

The last time I saw Phil Boatman, business alliances, Lexmark International, Inc., it was in Lexington, Kentucky in May at the first of the company’s six Road Shows…

If there’s one thing you can count on at The Cannata Report is that every year””at least the last 33″”we conduct our annual Survey of independent dealers. It’s a…

This year’s survey garnered the greatest number of responses in the history of the survey””338 with 330 of those representing the Big Six manufacturers…

We started separating the A3 and A4 MFP lines with our 2014 Survey and continue to do so today. Prior to 2014, the number of lines per dealer was influenced by…

At one time, dealers may have been kicking and screaming about adding A4 to their product mix because of the lower margins compared to A3, but despite…

The days of the dealer dedicated to a single A3 manufacturer may be waning, but as we’ve seen during the past three years of the Survey, that figure has…

This year, we saw a modest increase in the number of dedicated dealers compared with 2017, which we attribute to the greater number of Survey respondents…

When analyzing our Survey results, we do not base our findings on profitability and choose to examine revenue. This year, the total dealer revenue of our entire…

Up until our 32nd Annual Dealer Survey in 2017, we tracked the numbers for the $5 Million-Plus Club, dealers with revenues of $5 million or greater. During the…

The emergence of MPS has given desktop printers credibility within the dealer channel. Regardless of how dealers define their MPS offerings, printers remain an…

Since we began tracking dealers’ engagement in MPS, it’s been fascinating to watch the evolution of this offering. As much as MPS has become seemingly…

Providing managed IT or managed network services continues to be the most golden of opportunities for the dealer channel. (We’ll refrain from using “managed…

If service is core to a dealership’s business, then there is great value in examining the makeup of a dealership’s technical operations with an emphasis on…