Issue 384:

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…

Private-equity money continued to flow into the channel in 2017; Ricoh sold much of its SMB MIF to a select group of dealers, which strengthened their…

Since we began conducting this Survey, there hasn’t been a single year where acquisitions were not shaping the dealer landscape in one way or another. The days…

Even before we started asking dealers to identify their greatest opportunities for growth, the dealer channel has been constantly on the lookout for the next…

A man walks into a bar in the college town of Iowa City, Iowa, and buys it. Then, he discovers no matter how hard he works, whenever a hot new trendy bar opens…

After conquering the Fort Collins market with its office technology offerings and developing reputation for superior service, Capital Business Systems is looking to…

Social marketing may be common sense, but the problem is common sense is not very common. That’s according to social marketing strategist Ted Rubin, CMO,…

After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 2006, Kimberly Buchanan faced a common problem shared by many young graduates. Though she excelled in…