"At this time, we have linked NetRICOH with our mission-critical business application infrastructure simplifying portal development and increased performance," said Atsushi Hanai, general manager of NetRICOH at e-Business Center, Ricoh's Marketing Group, as Ricoh Company, Ltd., Tokyo, a leading provider of office equipment, announced that it has implemented BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 for its customer relationship management (CRM) portal site in Japan called NetRICOH.

"After evaluating the conventional package applications and realizing that the requirements for engineering resources were more than we could commit, we turned our attention to J2EE, the de facto standard technology application development platforms. Compared to other J2EE options, we feel WebLogic Portal is the best choice for us. It is designed to allow speedy implementation of additional functions which can help to reduce development and management costs," Hanai continued.

Having migrated from a packaged application to J2EE based WebLogic, Ricoh's goal is to improve business efficiencies while lowering costs for customer management.

Developed in March 2000, NetRICOH offers one-to-one services to Ricoh customers in Japan. It was designed to provide each customer an optimal way to interact with the company to gather useful data about Ricoh products as well as industry and business information and utilize the company's Application Service Provider (ASP) solutions, including groupware and the latest version of business applications.

In addition to quality customer service and support, Ricoh's plan is to build a flexible, one-stop multi-channel marketing and service system by integrating management of the mission-critical system, customer database and business support system at the back end with NetRICOH, Ricoh Call Center, and sales representatives who are in direct contact with customers.