01732 759725
24
PRINT VIRTUALISATION
Davud Fung,
Director of Sales
and Marketing,
UniPrint
UniPrint is a printing virtualisation
specialist that offers a single PDF-
based universal printer driver on
the application server enabling ‘any
platform, any device’ printing from
all makes and model of networked
or locally attached printer. The driver
provides a single virtual print queue
and compresses data by up to 90%
to reduce bandwidth requirements
and speed up application access.
Since introducing its universal print
driver, UniPrint has developed additional
functionality so that its UniPrint Infinity
solution now offers Virtual Desktop
Infrastructure Printing, Citrix/Microsoft
RDS printing, mobile/BYOD printing, cloud
printing and secure pull printing. Together,
these capabilities make it possible for
customers to speed up printing, reduce print
costs by 35% and improve data security.
Quebec-based Partner Solutions is an
application solution services provider for
medium and large insurance brokerages in
Canada.
It hosts specialised applications, such as
brokerage management systems, on a Citrix server
and distributes the services to customers via VDI.
Partner Solutions customers range from one-man
bands to corporations with more than 1,000
employees. In total, it serves more than 3,000 users
across 200 locations in Canada.
Its customers use a wide variety of print
devices, including models from HP, Konica Minolta,
Xerox, Canon, Brother and other manufacturers.
In addition to normal office printing tasks, they all
have a requirement to print from Partner Solutions
applications.
Reliable, accurate, on-demand printing is
essential, as high quality output is often mission-
critical. For example, in Canada insurance brokers
have a requirement to print Motor Vehicle Liability
Insurance Cards, known as ‘pink cards’, which
drivers must carry to show proof of car insurance.
Pink cards require an especially high-quality print
job as the card is considered invalid if alignment is
out by even a couple of millimetres.
Previously, Partner Solutions installed all
customers’ printers and drivers directly on its
servers. The large number of connected printers,
and their drivers, created server and stability
issues, leading to frequent server crashes, a lack of
reliability and frustration for users.
Joshua, Technical Team Lead, Infrastructure
at Partner Solutions, said: “We’ve had people in
Alberta log into an unstable printer that crashes
and takes the whole server down.”
In 2007, to overcome these problems, Partner
Solutions installed UniPrint, upgrading to Infinity
in 2012. UniPrint’s vendor-agnostic PDF-based
Universal Print Driver provides numerous benefits:
n
it negates the need to install multiple
manufacturer printer drivers on the application
server, eliminating all incompatibility issues;
n
it ensures administrators only have to
manage one UniPrint print driver from a centralised
location;
n
it supports all existing and new printers
connected to Partner Solutions’ network; and
n
it makes it easy to add new users – the
administrator just has to install UniPrint Client
software on user machines, including mobile and
tablet devices, and they are ready to print.
Joshua said: “The best part for us is the ease
of management, because we really don’t have to
manage many of the client printers. With UniPrint,
we were able to greatly reduce the amount of
printers that the server has to care about, and
it has drastically increased the stability of our
environment.”
He added: “Printing is definitely important to
our customers, and UniPrint has eliminated the
printing issues we had before, so much so that
ease of printing is one of our major selling points.
It’s in our marketing material as one of the features
we list as a reason to use our services.”
UK expansion
In 2012, UniPrint opened a technical
sales office in Cardiff to drive expansion
in the UK and provide the channel with
pre- and post-sales support. In the UK,
it currently has a distribution agreement
with Prianto, about a dozen active
resellers and, according to UniPrint Sales &
Marketing Director David Fung, hundreds
of customers.
Fung told
PITR
that the company’s
strategy in the UK was to increase sales by
targeting specific industries. “We want to
replicate our success in North America in
the UK. So, over the last 18 to 24 months,
we have been focusing on verticals,” he
said.
Banking & finance is one area where it
has had success. Standard Bank Offshore,
for example, is using UniPrint Infinity to
provide a more reliable, slicker printing
As UniPrint launches the latest version of its UniPrint Infinity managed
print solution,
PITR
caught up with UniPrint Director of Sales & Marketing
David Fung to find out about the company’s activities in the UK.
New opportunities
with UniPrint
solution for users of thick and thin clients
in its Jersey and Isle of Man offices (200
and 110 employees respectively) and
smaller, remote operations in London (15),
Mauritius (35) and Johannesburg (25).
The UniPrint Infinity solution,
implemented to coincide with the bank’s
move to a XenApp 6.5 environment, has
speeded up print throughput, improved
print quality and cut costs. Previously,
output was slow and printed documents
were often missing pages. Eliminating this
problem alone has helped the bank save
money. Standard Bank is also trialling
secure printing in a number of locations.
Good for healthcare
Another vertical sector of importance to
UniPrint is healthcare. Following successful
projects in Canada and the USA, UniPrint
is now targeting NHS organisations, a
number of which have shown an interest in
Partner Solutions adopts UniPrint Infinity to deliver bulletproof printing services to insurance brokerages
Bulletproof printing
Continued
...
UniPrint:
UniPrint Infinity
