FUJIFILM Business Innovation Australia to rename CodeBlue Australia and Upstream Solutions

FUJIFILM Business Innovation (BI) Australia has announced the rebranding of subsidiaries FUJIFILM CodeBlue Australia and FUJIFILM Upstream Solutions to FUJIFILM IT Services and FUJIFILM Process Automation respectively.

Managed print solutions provider Upstream Solutions was acquired in 2010, while managed IT and cloud services company CodeBlue Australia joined the FUJIFILM BI Australia stable 10 years later.

FUJIFILM BI Australia’s chief customer officer Stephen Sims said that the repositioning is a continuation of the company’s renaming in 2021, born out of the split from long-time partner Xerox Corporation that resulted in the Fuji Xerox name becoming defunct.

“Many people still link FUJIFILM BI with Fuji Xerox, and then they make that link to print, so we wanted to reposition ourselves to show our full capabilities as a digital transformation business, increasing the awareness of our portfolio with a focus around solutions and services instead of products and technologies,” he said.

“The retirement of the Upstream and CodeBlue brands is trying to make it easier for customers and prospects in the market to understand who we are and what we do, rather than having so many brands."

"Rather than go-to-market with a product and technology angle, we've joined all of our offerings together under five work streams: digital transformation consulting and advisory; digitally transform documents and data; automate business processes at scale; enhancing communication and collaboration; and secure and managed IT services.”

FUJIFILM BI announced the acquisition of IT services provider MicroChannel two years ago, adding enterprise resource planning to its offerings. MicroChannel was subsequently rebranded to FUJIFILM MicroChannel Services and, in October of last year, it acquired the SMB practices of DXC Technology in Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji.

Sims said that at FUJIFILM BI Australia’s recent annual partner conference, partners were “super excited” about the new identity due to the strong alliance they have to the FUJIFILM BI brand.

“Most of what they do [activity-wise], they want joint brands,” he said.

“In the IT industry more broadly, some of the big channel partners don't associate themselves with a vendor. They want to be independent, whereas in our world, most of them want to be linked to FUJIFILM BI.

“We make available everything that we do from a marketing point of view, whether that's brochures, case studies, campaigns, whatever it might be – channel partners can then take it joint-branded and take it to their customer base.”

With a channel partner base of 60 that spans both regional and metro areas, the soon-to-be FUJIFILM IT Services division recently removed extended lock-in contracts from its managed IT services offering.

Sims flagged processing automation as one example he sees for growth opportunity, telling CRN that while the focus for many companies in this space was traditionally focused on accounts payable and accounts receivable, "if you went to any customer in Australia, you would find a process that still needs to be automated."

“It can be something like school online registrations and excursions - many schools still use paper for that. It could be any business with a high volume of claims or any business with a high level of transaction with manual work,” he said.

“Big companies still have a lot of manual processes, as do SMBs, so with any company of any size in any industry, we pretty much can find something that needs to be automated.”

Speaking about printing, he said: “We go to our customers and say ‘let's try to reduce your print as much as you can, let's digitise all your documents, let's automate your processes’ and proactively get them into a new world,” he said.

“Some companies embrace that and have moved quickly; others, due to a wide range of different reasons, still haven't done that. Many industries are still very print heavy and that's where we try to help them.”