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IT SERVICES
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Konica Minolta turns the page
Konica Minolta seeks to reinvent itself as an IT services provider with the launch of Workplace Hub
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,
James Goulding spoke to Jerômé-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.
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
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
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 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
When
everything
runs
smoothly my
boss comes
up to me and
says what am
I paying you
for?
Continued...
KONICA MINOLTA
:
Workplace Hub
