repost from the league
In response to your issues - yes - Ricoh is following/benchmarking Oce's practice of setting up dealer vendors at local repro shops that sell only Ricoh wide format (instead of full product line). This has been a successful model for Oce and I could only imagine that Ricoh wants to follow suit. Duncan-Parnell is a Carolinas based Wide Format Repro/Surveyor Supplies/Xerox full line wide format dealer with roughly 1,200 wide format placements in this area. They have just recently begun to sell the Ricoh 240W product only. It is a little frustrating as they have marketing resources specific to wide format to tap from (that Ikon has not negotiated), but there are ways around it.
1) Usually when I go head to head with a Repro-House, I point out that the print shops usually sell other brands but use Oce in-house. If Xerox is so good, then why do they use Oce behind closed doors? -- I don't know how that is going to work now that they will be selling the exact same thing that I am selling.
2) Service Tech familiararity - Their service techs have just begun learning the intricacies of handling Ricoh wide format - instead of Ikon/or your vendor - who has been in it since the beginning.
Other than that, this practice of infiltrating through the wide format repro's is going to be a big challenge to overcome and will commodotize the product offering because there aren't a whole lot of differentiators from one vendor's Ricoh 240w to my Ricoh 240W. That is where Trix software and knowing some short-cuts like that may help.