infoTECH Feature

May 04, 2009

Ricoh Makes SOA News at IBM Conference

At IBM’s (News - Alert) IMPACT 2009 event (The Smart SOA Conference), being held in Las Vegas, the company is working with partners and customers to unveil the latest tools to redefine existing business processes and create “agile businesses that can be more responsive to rapid market change.”
 
Ricoh America Corp., an IBM partner that specializes in digital office equipment today introduced a solution based on its Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology designed to customers to leverage Ricoh MFP’s or multi-function products in conjunction with IBM’s WebSphere software to create innovative new applications and help reduce costs.
 
Users can interact with and initiate business processes from the control panel on Ricoh’s MFP. The entire system can be controlled via the MFP touch screen, enabling end users to engage in a series of customizable tasks or complex services at the touch of a button. The integration is designed to simplify the workflow for the end user.
 
Ricoh’s Mark Minshull, vice president and chief technologist, is excited to enable his customers to derive more values by leveraging the investments they have already made in their solutions.
 
“Ricoh and IBM have collaborated to … provide a solution that easily plugs into an existing SOA environment and complements current Web-driven business infrastructures,” he said.
 
At the IBM Impact event, Ricoh will demonstrate a loan processing application, however the SOA Portal can be applied to a number of different industries, such as insurance, government and healthcare.
 
According to a press release issued by Ricoh, the new solution can:
 
“…also help streamline internal business operations such as invoices, contracts, purchase orders and expense reports. Additionally, it gives users the option to customize each business process in order for the system to communicate bi-directionally. For example, if submitting a document that requires additional information, such as supporting documentation or a customer account number, the system will confirm for the user that all of the required items are included. If more inputs are necessary, the user is immediately notified and directed to fulfill the requirement in order to complete the process.”
 

Greg Galitzine is editorial director for TMC’s (News - Alert) IP Communications suite of products, including TMCnet.com. To read more of Greg’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Greg Galitzine
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