The ever increasing mobile workforce has changed many vendor strategies over the years and Panasonic is no exception.
The company is best known for its consumer electronics products and its line of rugged notebooks. Today, it is looking towards desktop replacement opportunities and business users to expand its market in Canada.
“Mobility has taken on a whole new phase and more people are working on the road in real time,” said Susan Black, national sales and marketing manager for Panasonic Canada.
Black added that more mobile workers comes with soft and hard costs especially in failure rates.
According to a study Black sited at the recent KLM Solutions open house in Toronto, ToughBook failure rates are at just 1.64 compared to the industry average of 24 per cent.
The ToughBook gained prominence as the notebook that would go into environments ordinary laptops would not such as ambulances, helicopters and police cars.
The ToughBook is in a niche market, Black said. The company is trying to expand the ToughBook out as other vendors come into the rugged space.
Panasonic has split up its ToughBook line into three categories: fully rugged, semi-rugged and business rugged.
“We are trying to go down from fully rugged as opposed to other vendors who go from consumer up to corporate and then to a military spec notebook,” Black said.
Coming soon will be a light-weight touch screen ToughBook.
The current models have more than nine hours of battery life, a full magnesium alloy case, shock mounted hard disk drive and it is water resistant, while weighing between 2.9 and 3.5 pounds.
The semi-rugged line is being targeted as a desktop replacement notebook, Black said.
Panasonic will also come out with an ultra mobile PC. “We want to fit in between the laptop and the handheld,” Black said. The CF-U1 will have a touch screen, solid state drive, RFID reader, bar code reader, finger print reader, GPS, built-in camera and two hot swappable batteries.
Panasonic has partnered with Intel and these units will be run by the Atom chip, which helps with battery life and heat distribution.
The company has a direct sales force but it is used just for support purposes so that Panasonic can understand how customers work.
That feedback is then taken to the factory so that they can improve the product, she said.
Panasonic has a VIP Gold Program and at 50 to 100 deployments it gets involved. “They are mission critical environments and we provide no charge repair services with shipping costs included and a 48 hour turnaround service,” she said.
There are more rugged notebook options in the market place today, Black said. “Panasonic has convinced the market on ruggedized notebooks and we are a strong engineering company,” she added.
Except for the hard drive and the Intel microprocessor, all ToughBook parts are made in house at Panasonic. There are more than 900 Panasonic employees devoted to the ToughBook line in 26 countries.
Each ToughBook must adhere to a partial military standard, Black said. And, all ToughBooks are independently tested for this standard.
Panasonic got into the rugged PC space in 1992 with the acquisition of Grid Solutions, who made portable PCs for tanks.
Panasonic virtually owns this space with 67 per cent market share. However, the Canadian subsidiary of Panasonic nets about $50 million in annual sales from ToughBooks, which equates to just 16,000 units shipped, Black said.
Panasonic is the 24th largest company in the world and the 18th largest employer with more than 270,000 people. The Canadian subsidiary has a goal of reaching a billion dollars by 2010. The ToughBooks will help in this regard because it produces much higher margins than regular notebooks, Black said.
