Ricoh is expanding its services to include web-to-print with its recent investment in PTI Marketing Technologies.

This move gives Ricoh a 30 percent ownership stake and is being used to further their objective to “Expand Beyond Print.” According to their company press release dated August 21, Ricoh will now be able to provide “end-to-end production print solutions for customers”

It’s certainly indicative of the future of the print industry, as Ricoh will now provide a number of things commercial printers could use as we expand into multi-channel marketing initiatives; such as data intelligence, document management software, and industry-leading digital printers.

Barb Pellow interviewed Ricoh executive vice president Sam Hosoe and PTI president and CEO Coleman Kane for WhatTheyThink and here are some things she learned.

Why invest? 

Hosoe is interested in their key technology: MarcomCentral. It’s an online, on-demand marketing asset management solution allowing enterprises to integrate and automate a variety of marketing, creative, and fulfillment processes using a centralized and integrated online marketing portal. This allows the CMO greater control over communications, collateral and collateral distribution.

The marketing operations management tool allows for content management, distributed marketing, and franchise marketing. Users can provide print, email, and PURL technology.   

PTI solutions can be bundled with Ricoh Technology as an option.

More innovation 

The partnership means we’ll more than likely see more products and services in the future as Rico and PTI collaborate on research and development.

At drupa 2012, they unveiled the Clickable paper demonstration; a multi-media service similar to visual search allowing mobile users to use their iPhone or Android to scan print media and access related online content.

Other technology being released includes TotalFlow as part of its web-to-print capability. TotalFlow streamlines the production output process from commercial print to CRD to high volume transactional print into a best-fit workflow.

Technology now gives us the ability to track our return on investment and as this metric becomes more important than ever, Kane says there will be more on reporting and data analytics in the future to allow companies to demonstrate a return on their investment.

Ricoh seems to be well on the way to helping its customers provide end-to-end print solutions and to become full marketing service providers.

What do you think? Have you been using any of these new technologies with your customers?

Photo courtesy of Ricoh.