Sharing Our bizhub MarketPlace Innovation With The World

March 14, 2017

Global bizhub MarketPlace logo

Creating an ecosystem that leverages innovative technology to meet and exceed customer expectations is always difficult, but when doing it in the global arena, it can be an insurmountable challenge.  Yet, this is a normal day in the life of Konica Minolta.  We have been a leading innovator for years, offering Business Solutions, Production Print Systems, Industrial Inkjets, Measuring Instruments, Optical Products, OLED Lighting, Performance Materials, and even Planetariums.

As part of our continuous transformation through innovation, we are constantly looking to thrive, grow and excel. And what makes this possible has always been the passion and teamwork of our people. Nowhere was this demonstrated more than with the launch of the Global bizhub MarketPlace.

The Marketplace platform offers a variety of productivity apps for use on multifunction printers (MFPs), allowing functionalities to be easily and quickly enhanced to meet the challenges of everyday businesses.

Getting to this launch was a long journey.  A global team was formed with members representing over 40 countries managed by the United States, Europe and Asian Pacific. Creating a global solution that conformed to all of the different countries’ legal, tax and financial requirements, as well as business processes and security policies was an incredible challenge. But, we rose to the occasion. This was truly a cross-team effort!

With the tremendous cooperation, synergy and collaboration between the Konica Minolta teams around the globe, we succeeded in launching on time with more features and functions than expected. As a result, the bizhub MarketPlace is now available in more than 35 countries.

It is built to power online storefronts in the global market and runs on the leading hosting infrastructure in the world today, Amazon Web Services Cloud. Each country can now take advantage of all the benefits the bizhub MarketPlace has to offer, with stores that have been customized to suit their specific market needs.

Customers now have the ability to create and install customized MFP user interfaces that have unique designs and features to meet individual needs while still fitting within a company’s workflows and corporate design guidelines. In addition to having customers design and create their own customizations, we provide professional services for the design and creation of these custom user interfaces.

The bizhub MarketPlace offers benefits for businesses of all sizes by adapting the MFP to the customer’s working behavior instead of the other way around. The wide array of apps available makes it simple to streamline workflow and improve efficiencies while saving time and costs, which essentially means more time for the core business.

Technology changes how we do things and innovation changes how we think of things, but incredible solutions change lives. The launch of the Global bizhub MarketPlace demonstrates that if we can imagine it, we can create it.  Something that may appear impossible only looks that way because we have not figured out how to accomplish it yet. Everything is possible.  Keep an open mind and dare to live your dreams with innovations like those from Konica Minolta.

Manuel Couceiro
Director, Solutions Engineering and Planning

As Director of Solutions Engineering and Planning, Manuel Couceiro is responsible for overseeing and managing Konica Minolta’s strategic solutions and planning functions, including application R&D, MFP platform management and R&D, the bEST partner membership program, and client engineering services. In his spare time, Manny serves as a board member for in-town youth association, dedicates his weekends as a volunteer for the girls travel soccer program, enjoys fast cars, Tae Kwon Do and enjoys spending time with family.