In earlier posts, I covered how MFPs are becoming more input-centric and how platforms and APIs are tying together the MFP with backend office and enterprise applications. But there is a roadblock that must be overcome in order to make this all work seamlessly in the real world.
The roadblock: MFP platforms are not all the same. Each of the platforms that I mentioned in Part 1 have different APIs. So, for a developer of a software application to integrate with more than one MFP brand it would need to use a separate SDK to write code for every brand. This gets even more complex because changes occur most times a new MFP is released, requiring new QA testing on every device – even if the platform hasn’t changed.
To give an example of this complexity, there are nine major MFP brands and each release 3-4 new “families” of products per year. So at a minimum, you are dealing with about 30 new devices to write to and test each year. Ensuring that the connectivity between the MFP and software application runs effectively is an enormous undertaking and one that most software developers do not have the resources to support. This is a major barrier and has restricted direct connectivity between MFPs and hardware. There are only a handful of software companies that write integrations directly to MFPs.
But there is a solution. A document imaging platform can be used to act as the connection between the MFP and software applications. The document imaging platform provider is the only one that needs to keep up with the ever-changing MFP manufacturers, updating its software to ensure that it works on all MFP brands. With this work completed, any software vendor can then just write integration to the platform and work with all of the MFPs that the document imaging platform supports. This “write-once, work with many” approach gives the software vendors the opportunity to let any end user on any MFP leverage the new input capabilities that I have discussed earlier.
This three part combination will deliver new opportunities to utilize MFPs in a more strategic way to power business process efficiency:
1) Hardware manufacturers making devices more “input-friendly”
2) The maturation and expansion of document imaging platforms to run on any MFP
3) Software vendors writing integration to the document imaging platforms
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