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Konica Minolta announces status as a Microsoft Global Managed Partner
Tuesday 23. March 2021 - Konica Minolta has grown steadily as an IT specialist in recent years, through both organic growth and strategic acquisitions. Among the companys central goals in its mergers and acquisitions is to expand its business by leveraging the power of Microsoft solutions.
Konica Minolta announces its new status as a Global Managed Partner. Headquartered in Tokyo, Konica Minolta has its Group companies in 50 countries and employs a staff of nearly 44,000. The Microsoft Global Managed Partner designation reinforces Konica Minoltas goal of bringing greater focus to its global strategic direction via jointly developed, industry-specific solutions and services and by delivering IT cloud services and solutions for the digital workplace at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the majority of the countries it serves.
“Microsoft has become increasingly important as an ally for us,” said Hajime Takei, Senior Executive Officer and Division President of Digital Workplace Business Headquarters, Konica Minolta, Inc. “The goal has always been to bring together the best of both worlds. We want to bring the leading expertise to the market, combining our knowledge from our business – with its roots in the print area, which we have been doing for many decades – and the technology of Microsoft. This designation is a true testament to our longstanding relationship and the exceptional work of our unified teams for clients around the world.”
“We are delighted to partner with Konica Minolta on a global level to accompany their growth in IT and to unlock the opportunities of digital transformation for their customers,” said Casey McGee, Vice President, ISV Sales at Microsoft. “The Microsoft Cloud is uniquely positioned to provide a breadth of industry-leading services and products to support Konica Minolta’s development of differentiated solutions for the digital workplace.”
As part of its market entry into information management in 2014, Konica Minolta began offering Microsoft SharePoint solutions to its customers. The company later added solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), as well as Microsoft Azure custom development. The company first focused on the markets of Europe and North America; with its new status as a Global Managed Partner, Konica Minolta has recently added the Asian-Pacific region. Today, more than 300 certified Konica Minolta employees worldwide are helping customers adopt and use solutions to help transform their business.
Microsoft-based applications fit ideally into the infrastructure that SMBs typically employ. Konica Minoltas expertise and deep customer understanding, coupled with intelligent services from Microsoft, creates a substantial benefit – especially for SMBs. In addition, Konica Minolta has developed a variety of its own applications, solutions, and services based on Microsoft cloud services to meet a wide range of customer needs in the SMB sector.
“The alliance with Microsoft enables us to combine our core competencies and trusted customer relationships with the best-secured and scalable cloud technology in order to flexibly build solutions for businesses,” explained Konica Minoltas Hajime Takei. “Utilizing their applications, we are able to offer our customers from SMBs systems and functionalities previously only available to larger enterprises. Through this global collaboration, we will be able to offer our customers even more opportunities to accelerate innovation and ultimately drive success.”
Today, those individually built services cover a wide range of functions in the field of digitally managed content and processes digitally. Examples are the target group-oriented solutions “Automotive CRM” for car dealerships, “for.RealEstate” for real estate agents and “for.CARE” for social and governmental customers. These tailor-made solutions can be integrated seamlessly with existing systems. “With more than 90% of our customers running on Microsoft technologies, we can ensure that our Microsoft-based applications fit ideally into the infrastructure usually found at our small and medium-sized customers,” added Jaromir Sponar, ITS Business Development Manager, Microsoft MVP, Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe.