Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink. And I’m here with Forrest Leighton, who is Director of Product Marketing for Canon. Welcome.

Forrest Leighton: Hi, how are you?

Cary Sherburne: Good. It’s been a little while now since you guys joined up with Océ, or acquired Océ. It was interesting to me as an observer to see the two companies come together. Both from a cultural perspective and a product line perspective. I’m just kind of curious what kind of results you’ve been seeing in terms of, I know there’s been a lot of collaboration going on in R&D and stuff. So what are some of the results that we see coming out as a result of that merger/acquisition?

Forrest Leighton: Yeah, there’s a lot of wonderful things. The combined R&D of now Canon and Océ, we’re really starting to see some wonderful things come out of that. So, for example, we introduced our 7010 BPS last year, which was the prism sync controller on the ImagePRESS color. So that’s prism of sync workflow is very nice and very powerful. In addition, we just introduced a variable print DP, which was really the first engine collaboration. That’s really the first true baby to come out of the new relationship.

Cary Sherburne: The new marriage, yeah.

Forrest Leighton: Yeah, the new marriage. And that’s a kind of black and white light mid-production product. But it’s an Océ engine with Canon finishing and feeding technologies in it. In addition to that what we just introduced recently is a new stacking capability. And so this new stacker that was built into the ImagePRESS color, and that was a combined R&D of Canon and Océ. You may say, “A stacker that doesn’t really sound very exciting.”

Cary Sherburne: Yeah really.

Forrest Leighton: You’re supposed to say, “No, that’s really exciting.”

Cary Sherburne: But you’re going to tell me why it’s exciting.

Forrest Leighton: I’m going to tell you why it’s exciting. It’s very exciting. But what it does, it opens up the whole world of us for third party finishing accessories.

Cary Sherburne: Okay.

Forrest Leighton: So you think about now Canon and the space that we’re playing in today, and then being able to add some more professional inline finishing capabilities, and it’s all about driving cost out for the print providers.

Cary Sherburne: Right, exactly.

Forrest Leighton: And if we can do that inline and in a little more professional manner with some very robust capabilities, we think that stacker will help us get there.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah, and finishing is always, it can be a bottleneck. And so to the extent that you can help them automate that, that whole process and integrate.

Forrest Leighton: That’s the whole idea. Prism in and then the finished product out, is kind of the whole concept behind it.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great. End to end.

Forrest Leighton: End to end.

Cary Sherburne: Solutions, great!

Forrest Leighton: That’s what we’re striving for.

Cary Sherburne: Well, so we’ll look for some more innovation to come out of that collaboration between the two parts of the company.

Forrest Leighton: Two parts of the same company, but wonderful things to come.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah, that’ll be great. We’ll look forward to that.