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General Manager of Sales & Marketing Mike Nelson spoke to me first, saying "We genuinely don't see ourselves as 'just' a scanner manufacturer - we're much more than that." He explained how the company vision demands that the entire channel community - distributors, resellers, SIs, ISVs, and indeed end users - are necessary to make the PFU Fujitsu proposition work.

Sales since the last conference have been very strong, Nelson went on, despite the fact that the overall EMEA market for scanners was down by around 3%. "2010, 2011 and 2012 were real boom years for the imaging industry," said Nelson, "And this was driven by a wave of large infrastructure projects in both the government and banking sectors. In banking this spending was aimed at improving efficiency, improving compliance and improving customer service. This wave isn't over, and we've not been sitting around waiting for things to happen!"

In addition Fujitsu have seen particularly strong growth in the SME and micro business end of the sector, following significant investment in the ScanSnap product range, where Mike Nelson described 'some fantastic business' being done.

BEST IN SHOW
The partner exhibition, spread across a show space the size of a small shopping centre in the luxurious Abu Dhabi hotel housing the conference, was highly focused on vertical solution demonstrations. Exhibitors included many 'usual suspects' for UK readers, as well as several newer and less well known companies: Spigraph/DICOM, IBM, ABBYY and Kofax were joined by the likes of ELO, GreenBox (from South Africa), IDT Capture and SmartDoc. The Spigraph/DICOM stand included a demonstration of the CumulusPro cloud-based scanning platform reviewed elsewhere in this issue.

Nelson explained that key vertical markets for PFU had continued to be government, healthcare and finance. His emphasis for the event was on how the channel remains absolutely vital to the company's plans for continuing growth. Recent innovations have included dedicated marketing suites like the one in London, where partners can demo solutions for prospects. Fujitsu's Partner Assist program has been specifically developed to help ISVs use scanning as an entry point for winning new business.

In terms of product development, one theme recurred again and again throughout the two days of the conference: the importance of PaperStream, Fujitsu's own image processing offering which has seen considerable development prior to being rolled out across much of the scanner range. As Mike Nelson commented, "The thinking behind PaperStream is to make even the most difficult documents useful."

COMING ON-STREAM
Fujitsu CTO Klaus Schulz went into more detail about the product development roadmap, agreeing that PaperStream was crucial: "PaperStream is being made available as a standard part of the offering on a large part of our range, right up to the fi-5950. We see it as a standardisation process, and part of our drive toward simplifying the product lines we offer to our partners and end users. Because of that standardisation it becomes easier to 'pre-define' any kind of scanning routine or profile and push that out across the network, or to subsidiaries. This lets users create true distributed scanning environments, while staying in control of the quality of results they are receiving."

Schulz went on: "This isn't just about the admin or management side of scanning, it's more about establishing who the actual stakeholders are in the capture and DM process. We can then perhaps 'simplify their life', or at the very least help them to review and optimise their processes so that they can standardise and optimise what they do within their enterprise. These days we see ourselves as 'equal partners' with ISVs and the like with whom we'd previously only been delivering a single component - capture - of a wider solution."

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