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A square metre of datacentre
It is this easy user experience that most
excites another of Konica Minolta’s
partners, Canonical creator of the Ubuntu
operating system used by the Workplace
Hub to connect the hardware and software
and so create the user experience.
John Zannos, vice president Alliances/
Business Development at Canonical,
describes the Workplace Hub as ‘a
square metre of datacentre in every small
company in the world where they have a
printer’ – an entry point for data coming
into that company and being distributed
to employees and for those employees to
be able to make use of an application and
push information out to the cloud.
He is looking forward to working
with Konica Minolta to build a broader
ecosystem of partners and applications,
incorporating developing technologies like
AI and machine learning to make the user
experience even richer.
“I foresee a time when this device
can be somewhat self-aware. Say, I am
in a hospital, what are the applications
that matter for a hospital? What are
the functions and services the average
employee in a hospital needs to use? At
launch, this product is about a horizontal
strategy hub, but ultimately you can see
a world where it is vertically segmented,
sensitive to the challenges of each
particular market segment,” he said.
For Zannos, its ability to make complex
technology accessible to everyone is what
really sets the Workplace Hub apart.
“Back in the day, there was somebody
that rode a horse,
who said ‘I am
always going to ride
a horse’. Then the
train came and they
said ‘That’s really
noisy, expensive,
never on time; I’m
going to continue to
ride my horse’. After
some time, the
train was all of a
sudden convenient,
inexpensive, always
accessible and
always on time,
and that person for
all their historical
bias stops riding
the horse. What
Konica Minolta
have created is that moment. They are
trying to package technology so it’s easily
accessible for anybody to use, and that will
drive adoption,” he said.
around this. We offer to provide services
for everything or just certain items – the
customer can pick and mix. At the moment,
we are offering back-up and security
management, server management, WiFi
management, repair services, copy and
printing services, IT helpdesk services, and
we will add more services in the future,”
he said.
Easy collaboration
The third element of the Workplace Hub
is Teamspaces, an HTML 5 application
that Konica Minolta has developed to
remove the things people still find difficult
about collaboration, which range from
connectivity issues to the complexity of
dealing with companies with different
collaboration platforms and different file-
sharing platforms, and even the difficulty
of standardising collaboration within an
organisation.
“Every company we encountered
complained about how difficult
collaboration is, which was interesting
for us because at that stage we weren’t
talking about collaboration but only IT and
infrastructure. We thought everything to do
with collaboration was solved, but people
said there is still a lot that is wrong,”
explained Zastrow.
“So we came up with the idea of
Teamspaces and putting everything to do
with collaboration – text messaging, video
calls, voice calls, file sharing etc. – under
one dashboard. We are not offering all
these services, but are connecting the
tools that a company already uses. We
can connect to Lync, we can connect to
Sharepoint, we can connect to Webex,
we can connect to Google Cloud, we can
connect to Dropbox and so on. This makes
it far easier for non-hardcore users of these
systems, while hardcore users still get full
usage, because it’s just a connector, a
different view.”
This application underlines one of the
attractions of Workplace Hub for small
businesses, which is the potential to
change applications and services at a pace
that suits them.
“There will always be legacy systems,
and smaller companies don’t like to be
limited to one vendor,” explained Zastrow.
“The only thing we do is replace the
hardware so you don’t have legacy and
old equipment. And you don’t need to
purchase it – you just rent it per month
per user from us, so there is no upfront
investment. On the software side, you can
keep using what you already use.”
Hub & spoke
Konica Minolta also unveiled a Workplace Hub accessory called the Spoke (naturally). Likely to be
launched in 2019, this portable workspace gives mobile workers secure access to all their files
(encrypted) when out and about. It comes with LTE (4G and 5G) connectivity and 2 Terabytes of hard
disk space and can be used online (including file syncing with the office network) and offline. The final
product will also feature a conferencing system and a projector. The latter could be used to project a
virtual keyboard onto a flat surface, enabling the Spoke to be used for input and removing the need for an
additional device. The current prototype is designed by BMW Designworks and fits into the cup holder of a
BMW Mini. The final product is likely to have a sleeker, more bag-friendly form.
And when
things go wrong
he comes to
me and again
says what am I
paying you for?
Spoke
Hub
