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PRINT.IT
01732 759725
IT SERVICES
Faced with declining print volumes,
longer hardware replacement
cycles and shrinking margins
for their core products, printer
vendors, for years now, have been
trying to reinvent themselves
as IT services providers, often
with scant justification and little
success.
Konica Minolta is planning to
buck the trend. Earlier this year,
it signalled its intentions with
the acquisition of ProcessFlows,
a document management and
automation specialist, and now,
more significantly, it has launched
a new platform designed to simplify
IT infrastructure and management
in small and medium-sized
businesses.
The Workplace Hub is a compact
server/storage/networking unit
that connects to an organisation’s
existing tools, services and devices,
providing a single dashboard
for easy management of the IT
infrastructure, plus a range of
IT services delivered by Konica
Minolta.
The platform, developed
with key partners HP (server),
Sophos (security) and Microsoft
(collaboration and office solutions),
is designed to help SMEs with
their digital transformation now
and in the future. The product
roadmap, for example, includes the
integration of technologies such as
IoT, AI, Intelligent Edge and Decision
Support as they become part of the
workplace of tomorrow.
When it is launched in the
autumn, Konica Minolta’s platform
will be available in four versions:
the standalone Edge; the rack
Edge; the Workplace Hub; and the
Workplace Hub Mini. The Workplace
Hub variants feature an Edge built
into an enclosure beneath an A3
MFP and an A4 printer respectively.
This link with Konica Minolta’s
heritage is for practical rather than
sentimental reasons – it saves
space in small firms with little room
for equipment, and the range of the
built-in WiFi antenna is reportedly
better if located within a printer
on the office floor rather than in a
server room.
Removing complexity
To find out more about the product,
PrintIT
spoke to Jerome-Etienne
Zastrow, Konica Minolta Manager
Portfolio Extension, asking him
first about the thinking behind its
development.
“We had a look at what work
problems SMEs have and found that
the complexity of the IT environment
in a small company is not much
less than in a big company. Yet the
big company has an IT department
staffed with specialists. A small
company or the branch office of a
Konica Minolta
turns the page
Konica Minolta seeks to
reinvent itself as an IT
services provider with launch
of the Workplace Hub
bigger company generally only has
one generalist to cope with all this
complexity.
“We spoke to these guys
and one quote that stuck in my
head was ‘When everything runs
smoothly my boss comes up to
me and says what am I paying you
for? And when things go wrong
he comes to me and again says
what am I paying you for?’. For me,
that really expresses the difficult
position these people are in,” he
said.
Zastrow pointed out that while IT
has become more connected and
less complex in enterprises, small
businesses have yet to benefit from
this trend and are still having to
manage large numbers of devices
and software applications.
“One of the people we spoke
to said he would be happy if
he could cut down from 50 to
15 administration software
applications. We said ‘You’ve only
got 50 people, why do you have
so much to administer?’ and he
said ‘Easy. We started with an
office in London and then we
bought a company in Birmingham
with a totally different IT set-up,
and then we acquired a small
company somewhere else and
they again had a different set-up’.
As a small company, you can’t
immediately renew the entire IT of
the companies involved, so huge
complexity builds up.
“We thought how can we
change that. We looked at all the
IT infrastructure in a company and
basically put all those that are
accessed by multiple people in a
box – the server, the storage, the
WiFi networking, security, printers
and so on. We standardised that so
that every workplace has the same
server, the same storage, the same
security and created a dashboard
that we put on top so that now the
IT generalist doesn’t have to cope
with 10 or 15 different applications,
The
complexity
of the IT
environment
in a small
company is
not much
less than in a
big company
KONICA MINOLTA
Workplace Hub
Spring
2017
