MSP 501 Profile: Konica Minolta Business Solutions Touts Vertical Expertise

Company Name: Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc.
Company MSP 501 Rank: 8
President, All Covered IT Services from Konica Minolta: Todd Croteau
Headquartered: Ramsey, NJ
Primary Services:

Twitter: @KonicaMinoltaUS

There are a lot of industry shifts going on that MSPs are having to weather these days. As Todd Croteau from Konica Minolta Business Solutions points out, keeping up with compliance and security has become a monumental task for many providers.

One of the keys to success, Croteau says, is that the company has been very careful to stay true to its foundation and not overextend itself with products and services that aren’t complementary to its core competencies and to its clients’ requirements and expectations. It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially considering the increasingly competitive environments providers find themselves in.

Croteau sat down with us this week to chat about looking ahead to 2020 and areas he’d like the company to grow, moving into upper and midmarket opportunities and the company’s client-centric strategy.

Channel Futures: It’s nearly 2020. Looking ahead, where do you see your biggest growth areas in the next year? Two years?

Todd Croteau: When I talk about All Covered’s (Konica Minolta’s All Covered IT Services division) largest growth areas for the next couple years, I have to mention our robust vertical practices. We continue to see strong growth across all of our verticals, but especially within the health care industry. Our health-care compliance, revenue cycle management, managed services and value-based case care teams really accentuate our value proposition in health care.

Konica Minolta/All Covered’s Todd Croteau

That market specifically has become extremely demanding in regards to the integration, stability and security of their day-to-day technology. Having industry-specific expertise delivered from our base of health care market leaders has provided sustainable competitive differentiation and much more client intimacy within our base of caregivers. Services such as compliance and HL7 integrations have taken on new life in the last couple of years and our comprehensive portfolio really legitimizes us in the industry.

Keeping up with compliance and security has become a monumental task for many providers. Having the ability to leverage All Covered’s core competencies enables our clients the ability to take advantage of concise real-time business data and allows them to confidently focus on providing the right care for the right price within efficient time frames. In addition, we are also seeing tremendous return from our security and managed voice practices across the verticals and all of our clients, despite size or industry.

CF: What type of company do you find yourself competing with that you did not two years ago? 

TC: New competitors seem to come and go every day as All Covered moves into upper and midmarket opportunities. In the last couple years, we have seen significant growth in competitors that are beginning to invest in specialized consulting within vertical practices. Generally, we see smaller and medium-sized MSPs try to dip their toes into the proverbial vertical pools only to find out that motions such as putting a gavel on a relatively non-industry specific brochure is extremely transparent to the markets in which they serve.

We have found that vertical expertise must be comprehensive with industry-specific institutional knowledge and must be coupled with the ability to identify and share relative trends, issues and common use cases for success in these highly competitive markets.

For example, without the ability to resell, integrate and secure industry applications, the value a competitor offers a vertical-specific client and prospect base is …

… exponentially decreased. Although we have seen competitors in the vertical markets for years, we are now seeing MSPs get hyperfocused on a single industry with efforts to scale the business organically, or quite frequently with a host of partners that try to deliver as one.

CF: Anything of significance you’d like to share? Have you executed a successful pivot? Built a business during the Great Recession? Weathered a natural disaster? 

TC: Having been at All Covered for almost 20 years, I’d say our progression from our original focus on very small businesses to an expanded target of larger midmarket clients as well as providing industry-specific services to our vertical clients has been a great story and extremely fulfilling. The item that has changed the most is the pragmatic expansiveness of our service catalog.

Our size and scope allows us to use a center of excellence model where we have significant levels of expertise that simply surpasses what our competition is typically able to offer. It is an ongoing effort to organize and execute in the right way to have scale and at the same time have specialized offerings, knowledge and expertise. We have worked diligently to execute a client-centric strategy with a focus on consistently educating the field, all while keeping in accordance with our best-in-class ITIL model.

This allows our organization to deliver a consistent level of service throughout the country with even higher levels of expertise available wherever and whenever needed by our client base. We have been very careful to stay true to our foundation and not overextend ourselves with products and services that are not complementary to our core competencies and to our clients’ requirements and expectations. It’s been a sometimes challenging road over the last couple decades, but I could not be prouder of the team and what they have built in order to delight our customers.