Born in Buffalo, New York, and raised in the Albany, NY area, I attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where I played football. I moved to Chicago in 1994 to begin my career and bachelor life. The universe had other plans for me, though, as I met my now wife shortly after my relocation to Chicago – we’ve been married 25 years. Beth and I have four children: Devin (22), Isabella (21), Gavin (19) and Cullen (16). Our Labrador, Marley, completes our family and loves living on our farm in Milton, GA. Our family enjoys hiking, biking and attending sporting events.
I began my career with Canon Business Solutions as a Senior Sales Rep in Chicago in 1994, and I left Chicago in 2002 as the Branch Sales Director to become the Regional Sales Director for Océ North America (acquired by Canon in 2009) in Trumbull, CT where I held a variety of positions in Document Printing Systems. In 2013, I transitioned back to Canon as a Sales VP for Enterprise Services and Solutions, moved to Georgia, and was the VP of Sales, Production Print Solutions before joining Panini.
I joined Panini for many reasons. Panini has a proven company history and recent demonstration of employee resilience and strong customer relationships; Panini is a great personal fit for me as a CEO. I’m excited about working for a Board of Directors that’s investing for the future and the challenges and commitment required to maintain and exceed the company’s historical success.
So far this year, I have been committed to learning the structure of Panini, team member roles, knowing all Panini employees and establishing transparency and alignment of our mission and vision. I’m engaging with our most valued customers and look forward to navigating this pandemic so as to meet more of you – our valued Partners!
Our team is working diligently to define and accelerate Panini’s evolution towards secure identity solutions, and we anticipate our Partners will have a key role in commercializing this effort. As we define our next technology course, we welcome input from all of you, but it’s important to also stress our commitment to legacy products for the foreseeable future. We will be striving to be more intentional in our Partner focus and relationships, and to move faster and be more nimble and responsive to your needs as we define opportunities to leverage and expand upon our mutual success.
I very much value the role of our Partners and look forward to a very successful first year as Panini’s new Chief Executive Officer.
Rich Kane
CEO, Panini
