“In Australia, our mission is to help our customers grow their business and now to deliver Enterprise Content Management and Web Content Management solutions through the acquisition of Stonebridge Systems and Knowledge Partners adds to our capabilities to deliver on this mission.” said David Cooke, Managing Director of Konica Minolta.”

“The integration of Knowledge Partners into Konica Minolta will certainly underpin the future business performance of KP through the combining of complementary resources. The expanded market reach through KMI’s large established customer base and a professional sales network can only strengthen the joint strategic business expansion in the ECM space within which KP has an outstanding track record.” Commented Carl Lindemann, Director of Knowledge Partners.

Craig Broadbent, Founder of Stonebridge Systems said the deal was mutually beneficial. “For our clients the acquisition means lifting the conversation from tactical to strategic collaboration, deepening our value and helping them achieve their business goals. With our digital expertise, we’ll be able to help steer clients of Konica Minolta through the fast-changing marketing technology landscape, freeing them to focus on what matters most: their core business and customers.”

"This is something we considered very carefully. It is important to us that we are aligned culturally and according to our values. Konica Minolta will be a great fit for our team." said Peter Murphy, Co-founder of Stonebridge Systems.

Shane Blandford, Konica Minolta’s Director of Strategic Business Expansion, said that the company was intending to remain product agnostic, and existing relationships with other software vendors such as Hyland, Filebound and ABBYY would remain unaffected by the new acquisitions.

“We will be not different to any other IT services company from that perspective,” he added.

“In the US Hyland is very strong in the insurance vertical, while OpenText is very strong with SAP. With different products we are able to segment the marketplace and have a much deeper engagement with our customers with the correct product outcome.

“Our organisation at this point has decided not to go down the road of acquiring software companies. We are a technology company with our own R&D in hardware and materials. These acquisitions have been made by Konica Minolta Business Solutions Australia to help us quickly grow the capability of being able to provide these services in the marketplace. We now have definite value ads for our government and business clients linked to scanning and our MFDs and in business process improvement.

“Some of our local competitors have purchased managed IT services companies, managing networks servers and desktops, ours is a different strategy,” said Blandford.

“Market research we have done and anecdotal research from our customers tells us a number of things very clearly. Firstly there isn’t a business out there that is not trying to remove costs from their operations. There is not a business out there that’s not trying to have a closer customer experience and engagement, or one that’s not impacted by security and governance issues today.

“When we put those three things together with the exponential growth of digital content, it says that managed services for content is a very strong growing market and one that most medium to large scale business and government are embracing or will be embracing very soon.”