Oracle Customer Success — Canon Inc.

Canon Processes Data from More Than 1 Million Printers 5x Faster, Improves Customer Service, and Supports Business Growth

By implementing Oracle engineered systems with Oracle Fusion Middleware, we gained a high-performance and scalable Internet of Things platform that can easily process massive volumes of data from more than 1 million multifunction printers to provide better customer service. With Oracle’s leading technology, we also ensured seamless migration to the new Oracle system without causing disruption to our customer printing operations.

— Masato Ochiai, General Manager, Office Imaging Products Document Solution Development Center, Canon Inc.

Founded in 1937 as a manufacturer of high-quality cameras, Canon Inc. today operates three business divisions: imaging products, such as cameras and video cameras; office products, including multifunction printers and facsimile machines; and industrial devices, such as medical equipment. As part of its core office products business, Canon provides various Internet of Things (IoT) services, including a remote monitoring service for multifunction printers, and document services that support customers’ total printing operations, enabling them to get the most out of big data.

Challenges

Build a high-performing and scalable infrastructure to enable IoT system to rapidly process massive amounts of data received from more than 1 million multifunction printers in over 100 countries, and support 2x anticipated growth in the number of printers connected to the IoT
Ensure seamless migration to the new IoT platform to minimize disruption to global office-products business operations
Deploy a simple and easy-to-manage disaster recovery system to reduce the switchover time in the IoT environment in the event of an unforeseen major disaster, such as an earthquake, and ensure data security

Results

Improved system performance by running Oracle Event Processing and Oracle Coherence on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud to receive and process large volumes of printer data from more than 1 million multifunction printers and respond to queries 5x faster, while reducing batch processing time by 50%
Prepared Canon to support up to 2 million printers via the IoT system in the next few years, thanks to a high-performing and scalable Oracle engineered system and Oracle Coherence’s in-memory data grid technology

Minimized the adverse impact of data migration to the new platform on distributors’ and retailers’ service operations, by using Oracle Service Bus to connect and transmit the data from multifunction printers to both the legacy system and the new platform, ensuring data consistency
Eliminated the need for users to make any adjustment when using the system by adopting Oracle GoldenGate to enable real-time data replication and ensure successful migration of existing Oracle Database
Strengthened data security by using Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Active Data Guard to enable automatic failover to the standby database at the disaster recovery site, preventing data loss and minimizing data restoration time

Why Oracle

After evaluating various vendor solutions, Canon chose Oracle because Oracle engineered systems’ high-performance hardware and Oracle Coherence’s leading in-memory data grid technology offered the best solutions to resolve bottleneck issues for processing massive volumes of data received from 1 million multifunction printers connected to the IoT platform.

We had reached a point where we couldn’t connect any more printers to the IoT system because of I/O bottlenecks and insufficient storage capacity. By adopting Oracle engineered systems and Oracle Fusion Middleware, we gained the ability to dramatically improve IoT system performance and achieve real-time insight, which, in turn, enabled us to deliver fast and effective service to our customers. Oracle was clearly the right choice for us.

— Masato Ochiai, General Manager, Office Imaging Products Document Solution Development Center, Canon Inc.

Execution

Canon started to examine the proposal from Oracle Japan to upgrade the legacy infrastructure for its IoT platform. After conducting a proof of concept, Canon decided to implement Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Database options due to their proven performance during the test and their cost effectiveness. Canon launched the new system smoothly, and completed the project on time.