Why be a Member of MFPA?

Types of Member Companies

The types of companies that are involved in MFPA can be divided into several classifications, as follows:

• Manufacturers of "office equipment", such as printers, scanners, and copiers, facsimile machines and all-on-one multifunction products.
• Makers of technology or services that are used by manufacturers of office equipment. Such technology includes the following:
  • Embedded kernels, operating systems, file systems, etc.
  • Imaging software, page description interpreters, RIPs, etc.
  • Communications software and protocol stacks
  • Electronic chips, image compressors, DSPs, communications ASICs
  • Board-level systems, controllers, network interface cards, and engine specific interfaces
  • Print, scan, and combination electromechanical "engines"
• Makers of drivers, operating systems, communications equipment and applications that interface with office equipment.
• Strategic and tactical market researchers, product evaluators, and technical consultants.
• Makers of test systems, test suites, image targets, and image evaluation systems.

Reasons for Being a Member

The following are reasons that may apply to your company, depending upon your classification as listed above, and position in the market. The MFPA provides the following benefits:

• Member to Member Promotion:
  MFPA provides exposure to member office equipment manufacturers and other members to promote your product or service. Speaking at our annual conference, exhibiting, participation in quarterly meetings, as well as web-site listings provides continual contact with these companies and their staff.

• Member to Public Promotion:
  For member companies that produce product that is used by the general public, our web site provides a product catalog that allows these customers to search for products that meet a variety of search criteria. Our site is uniquely positioned as an unbiased starting point for those consumers and corporate buyers researching their equipment purchase.

• Information Gathering:
  our regular meetings and conference allow your company to obtain valuable information about the needs of your clients or of related equipment that you must interface with. In some cases, we have supported projects specifically oriented to generated information for companies that were important players in the hame and office environment.

• Standards Generation:
  MFPA has been a active organization in the generation of standards and in affecting the course of standards work by other organizations. In particular, work with the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), IEEE, IETF, the Printer Working Group, and other related groups. Standards are important to many of the member categories for the following reasons:

  • Communication:
    For situations where equipment of different vendors is communicating, or where software applications are communicating with the equipment, standards are an absolute necessity. In these cases, MFPA has released documents and in many cases, our recommendations or early drafts have been sent through the appropriate official standards organizations. In many cases, several standards may exist to accomplish the same goal. MFPA can aid the industry by endorsing a specific set of standards and thereby decreasing the variation and associated costs in supporting all of them.

  • Feature Support:
    For situations where applications are communicating with the equipment, standards provide levels of expected functionality such that both the equipment manufacturer and the software maker will have common targets for development. If only one manufacturer implements a given feature, software makers may not implement support for it whereas if the feature is implemented in many products, it will be more important to support that feature and the effort by the hardware manufacturer will not be wasted.

• Interoperability Testing:
  Our Plug-Fest events allow manufacturers of equipment to test their equipment in a neutral setting with other manufacturers of similar equipment and with manufacturers of related communications equipment. These events allow new protocols to deploy faster and reach critical mass faster as a result.

• General Industry Promotion:
  If you have targeted the office machine market and the multifunction products market in particular, your involvement in the MFPA supports this industry and market. By supporting the MFPA, you will be supporting other companies that need such a venue to reach your company and provide needed products and services. Even if your company does not see direct benefits from the MFPA, indirect benefits are worth your involvement and participation.

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