Q&A: Iain Maxwell, Canon Business Services and Support director

Maxwell: Customers want to be able to personalise their printing environment

Canon launched its next-generation imageRunner Advance print platform at an event in Barcelona this week. At the event, V3.co.uk talked to Iain Maxwell, who joined Canon in 1983 and was appointed as European Business Services and Support director in January last year.

V3.co.uk: What will Canon’s new partnerships with HP and Adobe mean for customers?

Iain Maxwell: The HP partnership will offer customers a powerful proposition in the marketplace. They will have access to a combination of HP services and Canon devices.

Meanwhile, we chose to team up with Adobe because it is a well-recognised product and document format. We wanted to leverage what our customers were already using. We brought in the new security features for imageRunner from Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES because we appreciate what is being used in the marketplace. By combining offerings with other companies we can offer customers more.

Does Canon's decision to take advantage of HP services mean it is moving away from providing its own?

It is not a move away from services, it is just another channel to market for us. We can now go to market with devices as well as a software and services portfolio provided by HP’s EDS division.

Canon’s new printing platform imageRunner carries a lot of new personalisation options, such as the ability to set custom wallpaper on the printer’s touch-screen interface. Why is personlisation so important in printing solutions?

The research we did identified that personlisation technology is the way forward. People are used to working in their own computer environments with immediate access to their My Document folders. Printer personalisation features help the operator feel comfortable and have been shown to eliminate errors.

Also, allowing customers to personalise their printing workflows will simplify their whole printing experience.

How much more can you personalise the printing experience?

We could possibly have an application on the iPhone that would link up to an organisation’s printing environment. Who knows? Technology continues to astound us.

How are you driving innovation at Canon?

Innovation at Canon is all about understanding the customer requirements and then developing the technology to meet those requirements. Canon is recognised as an innovator because of the amount we invest in research and development.

In your division, how do you encourage innovative ideas?

My division is focused on Canon’s service areas and we are encouraging staff to look for opportunities to do things differently and approach the whole service delivery model differently.

We have just dramatically changed the model. Before we supported customers through field services. The customer would call us and we would send an engineer to help. Now we have moved to a model of remote support and preventative maintenance to ensure no downtime for the customer.

Remote service support has been around for a long time in the company and generally in the software world. The new imageRunner device lets us take a step forward in the area because until now we could not access each of our customers’ devices remotely. Now we access the service modes on each device and diagnose the problem. Also, Canon’s new content delivery system means we can upgrade customers’ operating systems remotely.

What do you think is the most exciting aspect of the new imageRunner platform?

The fact that the serviceability is more modular so we can easily rip and replace bits of the system while ensuring uptime for the customer. The time it takes to service the printers has been dramatically lowered due to this new architecture and change in physical hardware.

Canon said the launch of imageRunner is the biggest announcement the company has made in the past 10 years. When can customers expect the next big launch?

I can’t say at the moment. We still need to get the whole product portfolio moved to the imageRunner platform so it is really too early to discuss. But I can tell you that innovation, integration and serviceability are the key areas that we will keep working on.

What impact has the economic downturn had on organisations' printing budgets?

I think the majority of organisations have no specific budgets for printers. Our research suggests that 40 per cent of companies want to improve their processes, either to reduce costs or to improve productivity.

How can Canon help organisations cut costs?
The new imageRunner platform with its lower running cost, higher speed and better running time gives customers more output, which brings the cost of ownership down.