What’s Hot & What’s Not?

This week Larry Weiss, president of Atlantic, Tomorrows Office, in New York City, shares what’s hot and what’s not in his market. Atlantic sells Ricoh, Toshiba, Konica Minolta, and Kyocera devices and offers a range of services, including Managed IT, Document Management, MPS, and Records Retention.

What’s hot?

Weiss: Disaster recovery. That’s what’s hot here, you either want to be selling generators or time in a co-location. Since the storm, even during the storm we took their service and moved them to one of these co-locations which are 59 building have 99.99 percent uptime and we’ve had a quite a bit of interest in that. We’ve done 10 of these already. These are all recurring revenue, you move them in, they’re all monthly, so their service is now on site and all they need is Internet access and you could work from anywhere. That’s what’s hot right now, that and generators, but we’re not in the generator business.

What’s not?

Weiss: We keep moving upstream. We used to sell 35-ppm black & white machines, we don’t sell many 35-ppm low-end machines or even low-end color are just not hot for us. I’ll say that our average lowest speed machine we sell with any type of speed is 45 ppm or more. And fax machines are not hot, but fax boards are. We do a big year-end sales promotion and move almost 500 machines in three weeks and 70 percent had faxboards in them. I was just blown away by that.

Scott Cullen
About the Author
Scott Cullen has been writing about the office technology industry since 1986. He can be reached at scott_cullen@verizon.net.