While at the Canatta Awards Dinner last week, I had asked a question to Lou Sticklin (Director of Marketing) how Muratec America got started.
For those of us that are dinosaurs in the industry, we remember that Muratec America was once known as a Murata Business Systems in the early eighties.
Lou told me that there was a group of people from Burroughs Corporation/Fax Division that approached Mr. Murata and convinced him to market Murata Fax machines here in the United States. Thus in 1985 Murata started marketing their own fax systems under it's own name from their corporate office in Dallas, Texas. In 1986 Burroughs Corporation merged with Sperry Corporation and changed their name to Unisys. In 1992 Murata Business Solutions changed their name to Muratec Americas.
By, 1986, I had my own dealership. It was not uncommon for office equipment dealers to carry one brand of copiers and a different brand of fax machines. My dealership was Authorized for Adler Royal (mita) copiers and over the years we had three different fax partners. They were Teli (Sweden), Mitsubishi and then Brother.
Fax sales in the eighties were HOT! Every business had to have at least one, and if you were fortunate to have some large accounts you couldn't keep them in stock.
Selling fax machines was just like selling copiers, phone calls, newspaper ads, knocking on the doors was the way to fill your funnel. Here in the NY metro area, I can remember cold calling and always either going up against a dealer that sold the Murata fax machines or I had to quote against them. They were solid machines and they always had the newest feature set to offer the customers. Back in the eighties if you had a Murata Dealership you were the crÈme de la crÈme of the office equipment dealers. If you were just starting your dealership you then opted for the Teli, Omni fax, Hitachi, Sanyo's of the world.
I can still remember companies that would have 8 or 10 fax machines side by side, all they did was receive faxes from their customers. Other customers would have one for incoming and one for outgoing. I can also remember buying hundreds of boxes of thermal roll fax paper each month. You see, back then, the only consumable was the paper. It wasn't until the mid nineties that we saw the transition to plain paper fax machines.
When thinking about the History of Fax machines, I'll always remember that Murata was an awesome machine and a tough one to beat.
BTW, Lou was kind enough to email me some very old brochures for the site, you can view them here.
-=Good Selling=-
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