HP Brings Enterprise Printing And Imaging To SMBs
As it is in other parts of the IT landscape, mobility is a growing trend among SMBs. HP's ePrint Enterprise offering gives mobile workers the ability to print documents from any device, and all data stays within the corporate network in line with regulatory compliance requirements.
Health care is one sector where this sort if capability is in particularly high demand, says Susy Brooks, manager of HP's Channel Solutions team. "This is not only important for businesses, we're also seeing doctors and hospital staff printing from their iPads," she said in an interview.
HP is training partners to sell the combination of ePrint Enterprise and another offering called HP Access Control, a set of technologies for tracking and managing print output which includes strong security from pull printing and user authentication. "This requires a company's employee to authenticate themselves when picking up the print job once it's completed," Brooks said.
The third offering, TROY Secure Document Printing (SDP), adds anti-fraud security measures to print files before they’re sent to the printer, which allows customers to use regular print paper for documents containing sensitive or confidential data. "This is definitely a health-care play," said Brooks. "It's often used for prescription printing, and the anti-fraud feature will indicate if a piece of paper has been copied without a valid prescription."
To sell these offerings, partners must first complete training and certifications, but once this is completed they'll earn PartnerONE credit for their sales and also be able to differentiate their hardware and services offerings, according to Brooks.
HP offers sales and technical training to VARs to help them target the appropriate solutions for specific customer environments provide am overall higher level of service.
"Typically these partners are interested in broadening their portfolio beyond hardware and standard break-fix professional services. They want to get into workflow and document management types of solutions," Brooks said.