Yesterday I attended a press event from Konica Minolta in New York City. From the get go this seemed like it was going to be a pretty significant event. Rather than hosting the event in Ramsey (their HQ), which was only 30 miles away, they chose NYC. About 30 analysts and press members stayed at a great hotel and had an excellent dinner with Konica Minolta’s key executives. That’s one thing I love about them. Rather than waiting for the following morning to engage us at the event, KM’s senior execs used the opportunity to interact with us in a social manner. In any case, by the end of the evening you couldn’t help but feel this was kind of a “statement event.” Things are clearly going well for KM and they want people to know.

The event the next morning was held at the Konica Minolta offices in Manhattan. After a brief welcome and introduction from VP of Strategic Business Development Kay Fernandez, President and COO Rick Taylor was front and center to kick off a significant hardware announcement and lay out Konica Minolta’s “#Blueprint” for the future. For you Twitter enthusiasts, that was the “hashtag” for the event so if you search Twitter for #blueprint you will see dozens of tweets that occurred during the event.

Actually, the Twitter frenzy began before the event, which was really cool. The night before we all left for NYC, several analysts, including myself as well as KM’s execs got a nice buzz going, hyping the event. Social Media strikes again. It was a great way to generate excitement for their event prior to it even starting.

Rick covered some of the basics; KM revenue is up globally 16% YoY, their operating income is up 42% YoY and they’re seeing growth in just about all areas:

• Production revenue up 39%
• Global revenue up 41%
• IT services up 84%

[Tweet “Simply put, #KonicaMinolta is rolling. @KonicaMinoltaUS”]

For any of you that doubted KM’s All Covered strategy initially, I think we can all agree at this point that it was spot on. At one point, All Covered President Todd Croteau told listeners that every month, All Covered writes more proposals and closes more deals with Konica Minolta dealers and branches than they did the month before and that’s literally been the case since they were acquired.

Rick went on to discuss Konica Minolta’s commitment to the environment and the community. He also talked about print and how it is and will continue to be a healthy part of KM well into the future. “Print is going to continue to grow for Konica Minolta,” he told the crowd.

One area KM is turning their attention to is A4. “This year A4 is a focus for us…especially in Enterprise accounts. We are going to try to double our A4 business in the US this year.”

That’s a pretty ambitious goal but Taylor joked it’s not hard to double their current number. Still, coming this late to the game means it may be challenging to get dealers behind these products. By now everyone has already picked up a second or third product line to cover the A4 hole Konica Minolta and others had in the past.

I don’t think it’s going to be easy muscling their way into a crowded A4 market with respect to dealers. On the other hand, Konica Minolta does have a significant direct channel that will no doubt be far more competitive with the new A4 products, particularly with respect to MPS.

One question I had was on Konica Minolta’s 3D program and what’s happening since they announced their partnership with 3D Systems. Rick told me it’s going great. They bought a ton of stock and they’ve sold right through it. More importantly, these printers aren’t just being sold by branches, dealers are selling them too.

Next, Sam Errigo, Senior VP Business Intelligence Services talked to us about KM’s services and solutions platform. KM will shortly be introducing 17 new solutions, nine of which are SaaS based. Similar to the growth experience KM is seeing in IT with All Covered, Sam told me that KM has literally had monthly growth in solutions since he joined them several years ago.

Sam identified the following areas of interest for Konica Minolta:

• Intelligent Assistant & Voice Interfaces
• Healthcare Knowledge Hub
• Connected Marketing Platforms
• Human Computer Interface
• 3D Printing Marketplaces
• Security Compliance
• Internet
• Intelligent Data
• Intelligent Space

According to Sam, Konica Minolta is making a strong push into ECM. He also said, “We will continue to acquire this year and next year,” indicating that companies bought over the last few years (All Covered, Pitney Bowes Canada, several dealers, etc.) may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Building on the ECM conversation, Konica Minolta also used this event as the launching pad for their Cloud-based document management solution. FileAssist for Graphic Communications combines file sharing, data storage, back-up and sync capabilities and more will be available in the third quarter.

Finally, Director of Product Marketing Dino Pagliarello took the stage to introduce the new flagship printer, the 100-PPM Konica Minolta bizhub PRESS C1100 and its sister product, the 85-PPM C1085.

The clean sheet design offers customers true 1200 x 1200 DPI and can run heavy stock at rated speed – a weakness of many competitive presses that slow down to accommodate the fusing that heavy stock often requires. A new toner also allows for lower fusing temperatures and the C1100 uses about 20% less energy than its predecessor, the C8000.

Dino next invited four customers on stage to sit on a panel. Although the devices were just announced yesterday, these guys all got early production models and bought them sight unseen. All of them mentioned the image quality and how it is noticeably better than the IQ on the C8000, which has outstanding IQ in it’s own right.

All four of these commercial printers loved this machine. The print speed when using heavy stock was also called out by a couple of them. Konica Minolta rolled the dice getting these guys machines prior to launch and they were rewarded with four customers that couldn’t be happier.

In all, this was a very informative event. It was great to connect with KM’s execs, to get a refresher on what’s going on inside the company and where they’re going.