Taking a very methodical approach to the rollout of its Workplace Hub, Konica Minolta welcomed about a dozen customers to its direct operations in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, on July 18 for an extended look into the manufacturer’s revolutionary IT offering.
The hour-plus demonstration served as the latest stop in a 17-city tour in support of the Workplace Hub and the bizhub i-series MFP. Other stops have included Pittsburgh, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta.
According to Tim Hall, product manager for the Workplace Hub, these educational sessions have generally drawn between 15-70 customers, with a focus on the SMB space as well as enterprise clients with branch locations. The verticals represented in Plymouth Meeting, roughly 20 minutes outside of Philadelphia, included education, human services
Worldwide Push
Long anticipated, the Workplace Hub has roughly 40 U.S. installations, according to Hall, which includes vendor and demo cites, along with one being studied by Keypoint Intelligence. In Europe, there are approximately 80 in the field, with all performing as advertised.
“We’d rather wait and make sure it works the way it’s supposed to rather than rushing out something that will fail,” Hall noted. “It’s been a process, especially incorporating the MFP into the package, so now the operating system is a lot more stable.
“We prefer to be cautious rather than take a fire-off approach and let it all out there,” he added. “We have to get the support infrastructure internally and get people trained on it. This is not like showing an MFP, it’s so much different. It’s selling everything—IT services, IT hardware, MFP, solutions, the full package of everything combined into a single end point.”
The Hub comes with an impressive array of partnership
IT Ecosystem
The Hub is a unified system that allows all of a client’s IT ecosystem to be accessed and managed in one place. It is also scalable, with the ability to grow as the user’s needs evolve. It is targeted for the SMB space to provide a comprehensive solution to a segment that may lack the resources to carry a dedicated IT department.
“Everyone is enthusiastic about it,” Hall added. “They like the concept of consolidation for billing and support. At lot of SMBs have concerns about security, and they don’t have dedicated IT on site. They have someone come in once in a while and just do patches. But they don’t understand the vulnerability of leaving a port open.
“A lot of these IT issues, when you talk to customers about it, it kind of scares them a little bit. No one wants to deal with IT. Especially the smaller companies because they don’t have the resources to do so.”
Hall also provided attendees with an overview of the new bizhub i-series, which include A3 color MFPs (C360i, C300i and C250i) with speeds of 36, 30 and 25 ppm, respectively; A4 color (C4050i at 42 ppm and C3350i at 35 ppm); the A4 color all-in-one (C3320i, 35 ppm); and two A4 color SFPs (C4000i, 42 ppm and C3300i, 35 ppm).
For more information on the Workplace Hub, visit here.
