Happy Trails to IBM and InfoPrint Printers

For many people in the business workplace, December 30, 2011 is the end to a long era. It might have have actually been in the summer 2010. That's when the Japanese copier company Ricoh stopped putting "Ricoh | IBM InfoPrint Solutions" on printer products.

When Ricoh bought IBM Printing Systems, it was reported that IBM required Ricoh to use the IBM Global Services consulting group to manage the IT transition. Big Mistake. IBM and Ricoh chose Oracle as the platform, organized many too many committee meetings (if one committee is good then eight committees are better), spent three years and executed no parallel testing. Cut-over in September 2011 was Cold Turkey .... and it killed the bird. Major Big Mistake. InfoPrint instantly became blind. They could not see if customers were entitled to maintenance, see if they had repair parts inventory, see how to invoice the sales, and other minor little things like that about running a business.

Ricoh the copier company had also bought out Ikon the copier sales company. The two copier companies became occupied with letting Ikon take over the operation of Ricoh Americas.

In April 2011, Ricoh announced the transition of and end to the InfoPrint organization. The big roll-fed machines were headed to Ricoh HQ in New Jersey to be run in the same building with IkonRicoh, and any other product line, personnel and business partners were to no longer exist in 2012.

So now what?

Understand that InfoPrint did not build any printers.

Printronix made the line printers, and InfoPrint had a different control panel and different IBM IPDS. That now goes away. Test your IPDS print on any new Printronix machines. Most of it will work the same, but it is not true, full, true-blue-IBM IPDS. If you absolutely must have it, work with us on a refurbished IBM unit.

Printronix supplied the thermal printers, with no change but the label.

Tally has been an alternative in serial printers and provides the 4347-i models 8 and 10 for the IBM printer marketplace.

Compuprint built the 4247 serial transaction printer, and it will be now be sold as the Compuprint 4247 with the same IPDS as before.

Lexmark provided the workgroup lasers, and the ONLY change was the label on the front panel. IPDS was the same.

Toray built the InfoPrint 62 and IBM did have a unique IPDS controller. MicroPlex has a wonderfully compatible IP62/IPDS module that drives all of their continuous forms laser printers, from Toray and others. The InfoPrint 75 (now will it become Ricoh 75??) CF laser could potentially be available from us in a cooperative marketing agreement with RPPS - stay tuned.

For more information or help in making the transition to non-InfoPrint products, contact Warren Neeley at wneeley@pciprinters.com or 817-939-5614. Read more at Warren's website.