Credit: Dreamstime
Macquarie Telecom has inked a new deal with Konica Minolta Australia to provide SD-WAN, National Broadband Network (NBN), cloud and data centre services.
The two companies have been working together for more than 20 years and Konica turned to Macquarie for a new, expanded agreement to help streamline its telecoms and data networks.
This has positioned the organisation to advance its digital strategy, including a major SAP S/4HANA overhaul, which is currently underway.
Konica is also leveraging Macquarie Cloud Services and Macquarie Data Centres for data hosting and colocation services, with this environment expanded as Macquarie builds out its wider data centre campus across Sydney and Canberra, including its largest facility being constructed, IC3 Super West.
The Japan-headquartered industrial imaging products and services business employs close to 500 people and works with more than 6,000 customers across Australia.
“The future we’re aiming to deliver for Australian businesses is all about responsibility, connectivity and security, easily the most important qualities we need in light of COVID-19,” Konica Minolta CIO Nick Jones said.
“Macquarie shares that vision and has worked with us to develop a new, much higher-value agreement that leverages its new technologies, helping us to deliver our digital strategy.”
Macquarie has worked with Konica to migrate all of its sites to the NBN and SD-WAN technology, improving speed and efficiency by 30 per cent and reducing costs by 15 per cent.
“The groundwork we laid with Macquarie for these upgraded services set us up to be fully remotely connected when the pandemic and work-from-home restrictions set in,” added Jones. “500 people very suddenly had to go home and productivity remained and even improved in a number of areas.”
Security and sovereignty were also a key consideration for Konica – its technologies are at the centre of how Australian companies collect and harness highly confidential data and personally identifiable information (PII) from photos, scans and more.
Macquarie’s data sovereignty and all-local staff reduce risk and help to protect this data.
Konica is also embracing the new norm of hybrid work and building its technology services around it, with it looking to expand its Microsoft Teams footprint to support increased sales activity and internal communication.
“We’re seeing major sales happening via Teams and we want to embrace that rather than seeing it as temporary,” he said.
“We also want to encourage more video communication between staff – it’s easy to lose context over email and we’ve seen that cause avoidable issues between staff.
“We want to encourage more video communication over Teams, and potentially even video communications sent over email, to change this. Macquarie’s partnership with Microsoft, particularly its Azure Expert MSP status, is a huge asset to us to drive and make these changes stick.”
Recently, Macquarie secured a multi-million dollar project with land and marine, tourism and public transport service provider Kelsian Group (formerly SeaLink) using Optus mobile, Azure cloud and VMware SD-WAN.
