Last week, Ricoh invited a group of press and analysts to a discussion about its acquisition of PTI Marketing Technologies.  As our readers will remember, Ricoh made an investment in PTI in 2012 and has since trained its sales force on selling PTI solutions, including MarcomCentral and FusionPro (FusionPro is sold as a standalone and also is embedded in MarcomCentral). During the session, Coleman Kane, President & CEO of PTI Marketing Technologies, and Ted Takahashi, Ricoh’s Senior Vice President, Production Print Global Marketing Center, shared thoughts and comments and answered questions.

One question that several of us had was how PTI would be structured going forward, and what that means for the other partners the company is working with, many of whom are Ricoh competitors. Kane reported that PTI would operate independently as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ricoh with no changes to PTI staffing and go-to-market strategies.  Another interesting point made by Takahashi in answer to a participant question was that the two-step process that was used with PTI—investment and then acquisition—is handled on a case-by-case basis within Ricoh and that that process could possibly be followed with Avanti, although there were no firm commitments on that point. 

Kane also pointed out that over the last few years, PTI has more aggressively pursued enterprise customers with a significant amount of success.  These customers are looking for a way to better manage and deploy both printed and digital marketing communications and—in this writer’s opinion—are choosing to do it themselves because in too many cases, their printers are not effectively articulating the value they can bring in being part of this ecosystem and providing the solution themselves as a service to enterprise customers. Clearly a missed opportunity since although there is a growing emphasis on digital communications, these types of solutions also offer the opportunity to capture more print work. Kane pointed out that while in the printing industry, we might think about this as a form of web-to-print, in reality, enterprises classify MarcomCentral as marketing resource management, marketing asset management, digital asset management or local store management—in broader terms, a Marketing Portal.  PTI will continue to pursue enterprise customers, and there is synergy there for Ricoh as well since they have a robust Managed Print Services business. Gleanster recently gave high marks to MarcomCentral across four categories of marketing resource management.

With two years of close association already under their respective belts, Ricoh and PTI should be able to manage this acquisition well.  It remains to be seen what other third-party technology investments Ricoh will choose to make and whether Avanti will follow the two-step process that has occurred with PTI.