| The new broadband age is here
and computers all over the world are now easily accessible from home.
It is possible to access the Internet from wherever you are through
wireless LAN in train stations, restaurants, on street corners, or
from cellular phones. At the same time, enterprises must cope with
changes in the social environment brought about by measures such as
the "Personal Information Protection Law" and "SOX Act (*1)." The
focus of enterprise management has shifted from tangible to intellectual
assets, and an even greater reliance on IT technology is anticipated.
Ricoh has long provided imaging devices for offices, including copying machines, printers and facsimiles. At the same time, we have continued to support our customers' paper-based work styles. During the past decade, many office tasks have come to be managed on personal computers -- such tasks as document preparation, schedule management and mail. Now, we are in the "Web2.0" age and have experienced a significant evolution of the office environment and work styles.
Ricoh's imaging devices took on various essential office functions, such as copier, printer, facsimile and scanner. Eventually, many of these functions were merged into color digital multifunction machines connected directly to the network. Ricoh continues to be dedicated to supporting office work styles in all their various environments, integrating paper and electronic document management systems into surrounding systems as well as the Internet.
Our target is work style innovation, through skillful use of leading edge IT technology combined with traditional excellence in paper document management. The goal is to support improved customer productivity and knowledge creation, anytime, anywhere in a ubiquitous environment.
Expansion of values provided by Ricoh
Our position is to create value for our customers working in their ubiquitous environments by providing them with increased productivity and assistance in their knowledge work, in particular the transformation of information into knowledge and the pro-active use of that knowledge.
Transformation of information into knowledge includes multimedia information, i.e. text, images, audio, video. Pro-active knowledge use requires a system which collects knowledge from various work styles and allows the user to easily re-use that knowledge.
All of this requires an open technology, so that Ricoh products can interoperate with those from other manufacturers. By providing an appliance-like ease of use, customers will find it easy to use the services in our products. At the same time, today's ubiquitous environment demands a strong, secure system.
Values provided by Ricoh in the ubiquitous and universal office
To create a system most suitable to our customers' needs, we are working to methodically analyze their requirements and design architectures. That will enable the smooth integration of all products, service and technologies, even those outside of Ricoh, which is suitable for the Web age.
*1: SOX Act (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) was enacted by the U.S. government to reform enterprises in response to high-profile accounting scandals in the U.S. enterprises. It went into effect in July 2002, establishing a process of internal control and decision, introduction and inspection of administrative regulations relative to financial reports.
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