File photo of Todd Mumma, former president of Select Business Systems in Fresno.

Todd Mumma, president of Select Business Systems in Fresno, is more than eager to show the latest products they have in store.

In particular, they’re a purveyor of electronics and office equipment from SharpUSA, a company he says is leading the leading the charge in “smart office” technology that makes the workplace not only more convenient, but more secure.

“Technology is here now,” Mumma said. “It’s not something that’s in the future.”

One of Mumma’s favorite products out now is the Skywell atmospheric water generator, which works by catching the moisture in the air and creating water through condensation. The result is water with only 40 particles per million, while helping the user avoid wasteful plastic bottles and hefty tanks. For example, in the eight months that Select Business Systems has had its Skywell, they’ve been able to save nearly 3,000 bottles.

It can produce upwards of five gallons in a night. In order for it to generate that much, a humidity level of 30% is required. However, Mumma says this comes with little trouble, as heating and air conditioners help meet these rates despite the dry Valley climate.

Another major innovation embraced by Sharp is the ability to enable the use of an Amazon Echo device on all its multi-functional printers (MFPs). They’ve also taken extra precautions on something not as commonly associated with printers as with computers — protection of data. To that end, the Sharp MFPs are built with voice recognition for the people that use the equipment, whether for scanning, copying or printing.

“People never really considered their printer, or their copiers, to be an access point,” Mumma said.

However, Mumma’s not alone as a purveyor of some of the latest office tech in Fresno. Steve Reding, president of C.A. Reding Co., has been seeing his Ricoh and Lanier products sell well.

In particular, he takes pride in the D7500 — a 75’ interactive flat panel that allows for connection to a user’s laptop. They’ve also got the P3500 in stock, a video conferencing tool that allows for up to 32 different people on 32 different screens to share in a call.

The other big seller is data entry. For example, there’s the growing demand to sort out and extract data from multiple sources from different vendors for documents such as invoices. Handling this tedious task, Reding said, is one of the biggest problems being solved by the smart office.

“So a lot of what we do is not just the equipment — whether it’s copiers or printers… but the software solutions,” Reding said. “The document solutions are really the new things that are real enablers that help people get stuff done.”

Still, Fresno has apparently been behind in comparison to the Silicon Valley, the Bay Area and Los Angeles in implementing the smart office. But that might be changing as the demand in the Valley begins to trickle in. Reding, for example, has seen smart office and data security in high demand, especially in the health care industry and other areas where the protection of highly sensitive information is valued. And if the clients want something that C.A. Reding doesn’t have in stock, they’ve even taken them on trips to L.A. and San Francisco to see the latest and greatest.

Mumma added that high-profile law firms in the area have also been quick to embrace the smart office as a means of protecting their clients.

“The Valley’s always just slightly behind technology-wise, but I think it’s really progressing,” Mumma said. “There’s a lot of people… and businesses that require the data security and it’s necessary with today’s hacking going on.”

In other words, the future is now.