Keep on eye on Canon and Riso

Canon took a big hit when Ricoh bought Ikon and very quickly replaced Canon boxes with Ricoh boxes. But big hits are now common in this game. Meanwhile Riso keeps coming and coming. You can check out the July 19th post to see what I'm seeing. Then today I got this:

Canon boosts document management offering with IRIS buy | printweek.com |
"William Mitting, printweek.com, 10 August 2009

Canon has bolstered its presence in document management with the acquisition of a 17% stake in Belgium-based intelligent document recognition company IRIS Group for $22m (�13.4m).

IRIS specialises in scanning and electronic document recognition from business cards to invoices and its products will bolster Canon's offering in a number of applications, including large-volume scanning and optical character recognition."

The really interesting to me part is

. . . intention was to maintain the independence and autonomy of IRIS with Canon collaborating only on strategic development within the document management market.

It's usually very, very difficult for a global to do that. And of course just because you say that's what you are going to do doesn't mean that's what's going to happen.

Has Ikon kept it's independence and autonomy or ComDoc or InfoPrint? I can't tell yet. But I've seen over and over how it doesn't work out that way.