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IT SERVICES
Konica Minolta
turns the page
Konica Minolta seeks to reinvent itself as an IT services
provider with the launch of Workplace Hub
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,
Technology Reseller
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 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.
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
34
Zastrow points 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,
but just one.
“The second part is that we offer services
When everything
runs smoothly
my boss comes
up to me and
says what am I
paying you for?
EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
KONICA MINOLTA
:
WORKPLACE HUB
