From technology point of view, what are the new trends on the horizon with respect to scanning?
In terms of new trend, electronic file storage is becoming more and more affordable. So more customers are now opting for colour scanning since the quality of colour scanning is also similar to original document. Hence there is no need to do any image enhancements for scanned images.

More customers are now opting to scan in PDF or Acrobat format as they are worried about their scanned format being obsolete after some time. PDF or Acrobat is a format that has an ISO certification, and it will never be obsolete.

Customers now prefer to do scanning in minimum 300 dpi, as this ensures accurate optical character recognition (OCR) results. There may not be an immediate need for OCR, but in the near future, if the scanned document is not OCR, it cannot be indexed and searched in an optimum manner.

Technology has always been driven by new demands coming from enterprise users. What are the new demands that you have seen in the last couple of years which have compelled documentation companies like Fujitsu to bring out new technologies?
The customers are now demanding higher speed. For example, five years ago workgroup scanners were offering speeds of up to 20 ppm but now companies are offering speeds of up to 60 ppm for workgroup scanners.

When we launch such products, we encourage the whole industry to expect the same from our competitors being the market leaders.
 
Our corporate customers in India are now demanding higher duty cycle. For example, five years ago, a workgroup scanner could scan 500 sheets per day, but today, our workgroup scanner range can scan up to 5,000 sheets per day which is ten times more than what we were doing earlier. This demand has led us to create scanners and consumables which are more lasting.

We are also seeing more customers demanding auto image enhancements. For example focus is on auto rotation, auto blank page delete, auto color detection and punch hole removal.  Customers now do not want to spend time to do post scanning enhancements and so we have fine tuned our scanner drivers to meet this requirement.
 
Almost all enterprises are going green. In what way, Fujitsu products are more environment and energy friendly than your competitors?
All Fujitsu scanners are energy star and ROHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive) compliant.

Government agencies are one of the largest users of printing and scanning devices. What is your business strategy towards government verticals in India?
We are working directly with the major system integrators to get bulk of the government business. In addition, we are also organising knowledge sharing sessions to share information with potential government customers on successful implementations in other countries in the region.

Do you think adoption of documentation technologies is different for government agencies and corporates?
In general we feel that majority of customers in India has the same requirements, whether government or corporate. Organisations have accumulated a lot of paper and are looking for ways and means to retrieve documents more efficiently.
 
What's your position in doing business with central and state government agencies?
About half of our customers are government agencies. Hence, this is a very important vertical in our business and we have been focusing on this vertical for the last five years.
 
Lot of Indian states are digitising land records. Does this market excite you? If, yes, then what would be your approach to address this?
Definitely! Earlier we have approached system integrators (SI) for digitising records for the government agencies. Moving forward, we will continue to create awareness and further engage SIs for new upcoming government projects.

What are your solutions in document management solution space?
We sell mainly scanners (hardware). However, we do have a database of about 300 software partners and we work closely with software developers on a global basis. With this kind of partnership already established, we ensure that implementation of all the common document management solutions with our scanners becomes easy.
 
What is your distribution strategy in India and who are your partners for scanners?
We sell our scanners exclusively through an indirect distribution model through two national distributors. The approach through them is one tier (directly from distributor to end customer) or two tiered—through distributor to the resellers and then to end customers. In India, Fujitsu covers all major cities through our network of partners—distributors, resellers, system integrators and value added resellers.

We are constantly on the lookout for specialised partners in various domains and verticals to strengthen our channel base. We are looking at further expanding our partner base in non-metros, which offers good potential.

Do you have any plans to set up a manufacturing or R&D centre in India?
No plans for now.

How big is Indian market for Fujitsu and what percentage of your global revenue comes from India operations?
The India market is definitely very important for us due to its strong growth potential.  We are delighted to be able to achieve wide awareness in the last five years in India.In terms of revenue, around 50 per cent of our regional revenue comes from India.