Just seven years ago, there was no iPhone or Android. No one had a smartphone – or even heard the term. Only a small percentage of business leaders used PDAs with Blackberry and Palm being the major players.

Mobility represents one of the most significant shifts we’ve seen in the workforce. Three of five workers now say they don’t need to be in the office anymore to be productive, according to a 2012 Cisco Study. At Marco, many employees leverage technology to work from home but make it seem like they are in the office. Based on my recent experience at the a high school career day in St. Cloud and working with Gen Y, that’s not likely to change.

Mobile Surge
Smartphone users have doubled in the past two years and by next year, the majority of all mobile users are expected to have a smartphone, according to industry estimates.

Tablets are next. They already have a market penetration of 11 percent, which is expected to nearly triple to 28 percent by 2014. That’s significant. How many products can you think of that took over a market that rapidly?

I did a double-take when I recently passed the service truck of copier company Ricoh. Words like cloud, network design, computer repair and disaster recovery speckled the tailgate. Nowhere could I find the word “copier.” It was a sign of the times – and proof that managed services is fast becoming the “new black” in the IT industry.

When Marco first began to provide Managed Services in 2005, it was a market just in its infancy. In the past few years, it rapidly accelerated to become a strategy for a variety of technology companies – and beyond.

The multifunction device is living up to its name and re-inventing what it means to be “multi-functional.”

A multifunction device, sometimes abbreviated MFD, is an all-purpose piece of equipment that prints, faxes, copies, scans and emails information. First introduced in the 1990s, these all-in-one devices initially targeted small businesses. At the time, they carried a heavy price tag and while they integrated various uses into one device, print quality suffered.

With more competition and use came improved quality and applications; and today, manufacturers are rolling out a series robust models with new features that are significantly increasing their functionality.

During a recent visit with some of the leading MFD manufacturers, I had the opportunity to see firsthand how today’s technology is defining the “next generation” of these devices and making them more like computers. Here are some of the key features and functionality that users can – or soon will be able to – do directly from the device: