Lau­ra Dowrich-Phillips

You've heard of smart phones and smart ap­pli­ances but have you heard of a smart print­er?Not to be left out of the rapid­ly evolv­ing world of tech­nol­o­gy, Lex­mark is now mar­ket­ing Smart Mul­ti­func­tion­al Print­ers (MF­Ps) that are aimed at help­ing com­pa­nies re­duce ex­ces­sive print­ing costs. With the com­pa­ny now ex­it­ing the inkjet mar­ket, its fo­cus is now on pro­vid­ing so­lu­tions to the cor­po­rate and busi­ness sec­tors through hard­ware as well as soft­ware."We help all busi­ness to man­age how much they print, we of­fer cost sav­ings to the or­gan­i­sa­tion. Most or­gan­i­sa­tions are un­aware of how much it costs them in print­ing every month," said Navin Deo in an in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian re­cent­ly.

Deo is the ter­ri­to­ry man­ag­er for Lex­mark in the Caribbean. Rene Vela, the gen­er­al man­ag­er for the Caribbean re­gion ac­com­pa­nied him. Lex­mark un­veiled its fleet of 18 Smart MF­Ps in Oc­to­ber last year, which pro­vide em­bed­ded so­lu­tions for con­tent and doc­u­ment work­flow man­age­ment.These ap­pli­ca­tions are ac­cessed through the MF­Ps' new touch-en­abled screens and boost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by au­tomat­ing work­flow and ap­proval process­es."With our print­ers you can mon­i­tor what is be­ing print­ed, the time of day it is print­ed and the vol­ume, you can pin­point all of these things," Deo ex­plained, not­ing that print­er abuse can be curbed with their new line of print­ers.

The print­ers al­so al­low any­thing you print to re­main con­fi­den­tial. Cer­tain key­words can be blocked from print­ing and you can con­trol when your doc­u­ment is print­ed with a fea­ture called print re­lease."The doc­u­ment won't print un­less you are there to au­then­ti­cate it," said Deo.In keep­ing with the di­rec­tion of tech­nol­o­gy in mo­bile in­te­gra­tion, Lex­mark's new print­ers can be in­te­grat­ed with Ap­ple and An­droid de­vices, said Vela. Print­ing can be con­trolled from your phone. He said with the new print­ers, the dri­vers are all uni­ver­sal and con­tent can even be print­ed di­rect­ly from a mem­o­ry stick."One of our strengths over time is that we are a com­pa­ny fo­cused on print­ing and doc­u­ments so we are very flex­i­ble to our cus­tomer's needs," Vela said. He ex­plained that on the soft­ware end, the com­pa­ny could cus­tomise soft­ware to suit any com­pa­ny's par­tic­u­lar needs.

The Smart MF­Ps are a cru­cial com­po­nent in help­ing a com­pa­ny achieve a green work eth­ic too as it vast­ly re­duces wastage."80 per cent of the car­bon foot­print of a print­er is the pa­per you con­sume," he said.An off­shoot of IBM, Lex­mark has had a strong pres­ence in T&T for many years and the mar­ket is grow­ing, said Deo."We still have a lot more, a whole lot of po­ten­tial for us, it is a vi­brant, grow­ing mar­ket."He said the com­pa­ny is strong in the bank­ing, in­sur­ance and gov­ern­ment sec­tors and al­so have so­lu­tions for the en­er­gy in­dus­try.Lex­mark is a part­ner dri­ven com­pa­ny with com­pa­nies such as Mem­o­ry Bank, Ra­dio Shack, NJ Com­put­ers and Copy Tech, among oth­ers, re­tail­ing their prod­ucts.