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Solutions to empower and future-proof SMB IT today – Konica Minolta at HPE Discover 2018
Friday 30. November 2018 - At this years event from November 27 to 29 in Madrid, HPE Discover is providing an extraordinary platform for a dialogue tailoring the IT solutions of tomorrow to today. As an IT solution provider putting customers and their needs first, Konica Minolta is proud to be a part of this industry conversation.
At the event, Konica Minolta is presenting the results of an exclusive international survey amongst senior IT decision makers in SMBs, quantifying their pain points and key requirements.[1] It provides insights into the challenges SMBs face on a daily basis and the consequential obstacles to integrating new technologies into their systems. With Workplace Hub, Konica Minolta offers a one-stop all-in-one IT platform, helping to transform IT from a mere cost centre into a value-creating business driver. Arne Randt, Lead Product Owner at Konica Minolta, is presenting the insights from the survey and his companys approach to support SMBs in a speaker note titled: “Helping SMBs meet the challenge of simplifying their IT”.
“To keep up with todays accelerating business environments, master the challenges their businesses face and truly be able to seize the potential of innovative IT solutions like AI, IoT or blockchain, SMBs need to work on their existing IT environments”, explains Arne Randt. “They need to unburden their IT departments, enabling them to dedicate the necessary internal resources to these endeavours”. The research conducted shows that IT departments in SMBs dedicate a large share of their resources to handling IT problems and administration. 56% of their IT budget is eaten up by dealing with IT problems, with their most common IT struggles being hardware thats not working properly (27%), administrative IT problems (24%), out-of-date software (24%), security risks (23%) and crashing servers (20%). Rather than having to deal with an IT that is under delivering, SMBs would prefer to dedicate their limited resources to actively growing their business (48%) or dealing with the diverse business issues (57%) faced by their companies. 33% of senior IT decision makers rank cyber security as the most significant business challenge, closely followed by increased competition at 27%, with regulation and compliance, talent management and pace of technological change all at 23%.
“Bearing in mind these challenges and based on the extensive experiences and insights we gained from our close relationship with our more than 33,000 IT customers in Europe alone, we have created Workplace Hub”, says Arne Randt. Workplace Hub is an all-in-one IT system that seamlessly integrates hardware, software and services into a multi-vendor, one-stop solution. It is a scalable IT platform seamlessly configuring systems, devices and software via an intelligent operating system. “With this solution we are able to compose an IT environment which, through seamless integration of legacy systems, fuses a present set-up with the future of IT services, software and hardware in exactly the way our SMB customers require”, he concludes.
To architect this solution, Konica Minolta has leveraged Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) ProLiant DL180 Gen10 servers. “With Konica Minoltas knowledge of SMBs and HPEs OEM solutions expertise, the Workplace Hub has been built with best in breed technologies to support SMBs in achieving business outcomes with easy-to-manage tools,” explains Rod Anliker, Chief Technologist, WW OEM at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Konica Minolta has released Hub and Edge as the first two products from the Workplace Hub portfolio. Hub optimises office space for those who need it, building an IoT infrastructure with servers and software in a space one-metre square. Edge, a solution for those looking to boost performance from their server room, is a managed IT service that can complement existing systems to manage specific operational tasks or replace and manage all IT. Konica Minolta provides IT services to optimise processes for the handling and utilisation of information by offering consultancy, implementation of infrastructure and managed services.