Ricoh empowers mobile workers with industry's most expansive cloud services solution

MALVERN, Pa., Aug. 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Ricoh Americas Corporation today unveiled a bold new cloud strategy to help small and medium businesses, schools (both K-12 and Higher Education institutions) and other organizations lower costs and improve productivity by empowering their mobile workers with instant, remote access to important content wherever they are on the planet.

Ricoh's cloud platform, called the Integrated Cloud Environment (ICE), is a single interface¹ connecting mobile workers to cloud services for document storage, management and printing via Ricoh multifunction products (MFPs). ICE serves up connectors for an industry-leading number of 16 cloud services, including Google Drive™, Ricoh DocumentMall, Dropbox® and Evernote®, and comes standard with the most powerful optical character recognition (OCR) engine powered by ABBYY. Together, the services present an ideal way for mobile workers to expand their capabilities and for companies to advance their bring-your-own device (BYOD) strategies.¹

"Ricoh's ICE solution has resulted in an incredible cost savings for our business," said Fritz Hovey, Operations Manager, Herth Real Estate. "And by scanning directly to the cloud, we've been able to remove a step of saving scanned documents to the server, ultimately streamlining the entire process."

ICE enables companies such as Herth to use the Internet as their IT infrastructure. When scanning paper documents from an MFP to cloud storage services, ICE automatically uses its powerful OCR to turn them into fully searchable and editable PDF, Word or Excel documents. Mobile workers can access and print these documents from any location in the world via a smartphone, tablet, PC or the MFP itself. No local network connection or printer driver is required. The print capability follows the worker.

With ICE:

• Scanned documents are no longer frozen as opaque image files.
• Organizations don't need to take multiple time-consuming steps to move them to the cloud.
• Customers don't need IT staffs to buy, install and manage hardware and software for document management and OCR.
• Administrators don't need to type hard copy documents into computers to make them accessible and useful to mobile workers.
• Mobile workers who want to print a document no longer need to email it to colleagues at workstations to have them do the printing.
• Organizations don't need to lose valuable business information that, with ICE, could have easily entered the enterprise workflow. A salesperson, for example, can scan a purchase order and have it flow directly into Salesforce.com, accessible to everyone who needs to use the information for sales, service and support.

"ICE is a breakthrough for mobilizing information and making it work for mobile and in-office employees alike," said Jason Dizzine, Vice President, Technology Marketing, Ricoh Americas Corporation. "It's also an ideal way for companies to initiate their cloud strategies with minimal risk. ICE reflects Ricoh's broader commitment to providing our customers with services that unlock the potential of documents regardless of its format or location."

People at work with ICE

• A law firm can use ICE to capture contracts and store them electronically in NetDocuments® and easily find them for review.
• A manufacturer can easily share marketing collateral through ICE with its distributed mobile sales force's smartphones and tablets.
• A college professor can use ICE to scan graded paper tests to Evernote, enabling student advisors around campus to print them out on demand.
• A real estate agent can strike a deal with a buyer during a home showing and use ICE to immediately produce a purchase and sales agreement form.
• Business travelers can scan their receipts directly to accounting software instead of stapling, packaging and mailing hard copies to their business office.
• Any worker can scan a document to any email address, automatically converting it to editable text.

To scan documents to the cloud, users choose a destination through the ICE interface on their MFPs. To print from any smartphone or tablet, they access Ricoh Print Cloud through ICE, enabling them to release the document from any ICE-enabled MFP on the planet – simply by typing in a six-digit code. ICE data transmissions are secured by 128-bit SSL encryption. Ricoh's storage and OCR data center is SAS 70/SSAE 16-compliant.

Customers with Ricoh's optional MFP browser enabled can obtain the ICE services in two versions: the Standard ICE Module, which includes OCR plus the connectors to numerous scanning apps; and Premium Apps, which provides the advanced mobile printing functionality.

ICE supports all major mobile platforms, including iPhone®, iPad®, Android™, BlackBerry®, Windows® Phone and Palm.

ICE currently provides connectors that support 16 cloud services (customer's must establish and pay for their own accounts to each cloud service):

For details on Ricoh's full line of products, services and solutions, please visit www.ricoh-usa.com.

© 2013 Ricoh Americas Corporation. All rights reserved.

iPhone and iPad are trademarks of Apple^® Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All other referenced product names are the trademarks of their respective companies.

Contact:

John Greco
Ricoh Americas Corporation
(973) 882-2023
[email protected]

Jill Searl
Brodeur Partners
(603) 559-5824
[email protected]

¹ICE requires the optional browser card for each enabled output device.
a. PostScript option may be required for the operation of Print Cloud on certain older Ricoh models.
b. ICE does not include the cost of subscriptions to any of the named cloud services.

SOURCE Ricoh Americas Corporation