New IPG Video Captures Canon Anniversary Event

It's been a year since Canon Business Solutions and Océ North America were consolidated into the newly created subsidiary Canon Solutions America (CSA). To celebrate the anniversary, Canon held an event this week in Delray Beach, Fla., and IPG was there to catch the action.

With warm, sunny weather providing a respite from the winter chill saturating much of the country, Canon executives offered updates on the company's progress to attending journalists. A panel of customers discussed the role Canon technology has played in their success, and visitors got to see Canon technology in action at the company's Customer Experience Center, in nearby Boca Raton. (See video for scenes from the event.)

President and CEO Toyotsugu Kuwamura lead off the event by detailing how Canon accomplished the integration and combined the different sales groups. CSA revenues reached $1.7 billion in 2013, he said, and the 2016 target is $2 billion. Other Canon executives noted the growth in their segments, as well.

Francis McMahon, vice president of marketing for Production Print Solutions, noted that US customers printed 69 billion pages in 2013. He noted that more than 800 types of media have been certified to print on Canon printers.

"Over the course of 2013," he said, "we've partnered with every single paper mill in the United States of America."

On March 1st, Canon Solutions America will open a new media lab in Boca Raton, Fla., designed for live testing across inkjet and toner-based products. It will provide CSA the capacity to work with more mills to test more sheets with more inks, much more quickly.

McMahon announced that Canon is moving ahead with creating a CSA user group and has established a steering committee comprised of 10 customers to determine the path forward. The committee will begin meeting in April with the goal of a 2015 launch of the user group and an inaugural event.

Canon will also launch a second advisory council, the Digital Print Advisory Council (DPAC), which will kick off in March with 13 senior executives representing some of the largest companies in the world in financial services, book printing, direct mail and commercial print. Members will meet annually to discuss current industry trends, market changes and business conditions, and provide feedback to help guide CSA’s ongoing solutions and service development.

At the Customer Experience Center, visitors got demos of many pieces of Canon equipment, such as the 70-ppm imagePRESS C7011VP/S, with a long sheet feeder, supporting paper sizes up to 13x26˝; the ColorWave 900, which boasts an impressive 12˝ per second print speed; the DreamLabo 5000 inkjet production photo printer; the JetStream 3000 continuous feed color inkjet press, which prints 656 feet per minute; the ColorStream 3900, which prints more than 1,800 letter images a minute; and several other Canon digital printers.