The OEM’s suite of cloud solutions is designed to aid businesses in print management, whilst also saving time and money.
According to Lexmark, its new suite helps companies remove “the IT burden of managing their printing infrastructure, and help partners save time and money by managing their customers’ devices remotely.”
Allen Waugerman, Lexmark’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, cited data which he claimed shows the necessity of the release: “According to a June 2018 Gartner report, How the Cloud Office Duopoly Affects Wider IT Strategies, ‘…By 2021, more than 70 percent of businesses will be substantially provisioned with cloud office capabilities.’ It’s crucial that they do so in a way that minimises security risks and creates greater efficiencies.”
“Our suite of services is specifically designed to simplify the pathway to the cloud by reducing infrastructure requirements for print, simplifying device management, and providing print solutions that enhance productivity, security and flexibility,” Waugerman continued.
The Lexmark Cloud Services offering includes: Lexmark Cloud Print Management, which provides “secure print release with deployment flexibility to meet the needs of each customer”; Lexmark Cloud Fleet Management, allowing Lexmark channel partners to remotely manage devices at customer locations, whilst partner technicians can update firmware, apps and settings from any location; Lexmark Cloud Connector, which enables organisations to access, store and print documents from popular content sharing sites; and Lexmark Cloud Print Management, which holds submitted print jobs in a personal queue until the user authenticates at a specific printer to release the jobs – which in turn lets the user choose the most convenient printer anywhere in the company, and “ensures unclaimed documents with sensitive information are not lying around, and eliminates waste from documents that are printed but never retrieved.”
The innovative hybrid option is termed “a good choice for organisations that are challenged with compliance and bandwidth constraints,” owing to the hybrid option, which “keeps print jobs inside the firewall, sending only the print job metadata to the cloud to enable analytics.”
“Configuring devices onsite can be a costly and time-intensive endeavor for partners,” explained Sammy Kinlaw, Lexmark’s Vice President of Worldwide Channel and OEM Sales. “The remote management feature on Lexmark Cloud Fleet Management reduces the time needed to configure systems from days to minutes, enabling Lexmark partner technicians to update an entire fleet’s firmware with just a few clicks.”
All Lexmark Cloud Services are supported by a real-time analytics dashboard, which gives organisations “greater insight” into their printing, copying and scanning practices. The dashboard provides real-time statistics on usage levels across individuals, business units, devices or offices, allowing organisations to identify additional cost saving opportunities and export data for additional analysis.
The Lexmark Cloud Connector also connects users to files housed on popular content sharing sites, such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive accounts. Once registered, users can access and print from, or scan and upload to, their cloud service of choice.
“The Lexmark Cloud Services platform brings tremendous value to our customers and partners,” said Waugerman. “The ability to provide users with secure print release while eliminating internal print infrastructure aligns with our customers’ cloud-first initiatives. Lexmark will continue to deliver exciting new cloud services offerings in the months to come.”
