Danielle Wolowitz, senior director product planning and product marketing at KYOCERA Document Solutions, America, Inc.
If you haven’t figured out by now that Kyocera is focused on business applications, then you haven’t been paying attention. Its latest apps, CentraQ PRO and CentraQ, were originally previewed in April at its dealer kickoff meeting, but not officially launched until Oct. 21.
The two new apps, developed by KDA in the Garden State, are designed for cost control and security and bring benefits such as print queue management, cost control, security, and secure print release to end users. The target market for these apps is SMB, the sweet spot for much of the Kyocera dealer channel. The apps support all Kyocera products, including HyPAS and non-HyPAS printers and MFPs. Functionality wise, the apps enable QR code job release from a network connected smart phone or tablet and integrate with HID card readers for secure job release.
“It’s ideally suited to support our total document solutions approach because it is helping our dealer community as well as our customers solve those critical challenges as they relate to document security and printing costs,” says Danielle Wolowitz, senior director, product planning and product marketing at KYOCERA Document Solutions America, Inc. during a press briefing earlier this week.
The apps support the current generation of Kyocera devices as well as the previous generation. They do not support non Kyocera products. “These are products that [our dealers] can confidently go into Kyocera customers or prospects and be assured they are going to help that customer resolve some of those challenges around cost control,” emphasizes Wolowitz. “Ideally [they’re for] customers that want to improve their transparency and gain control over costs are companies that should be looking at a product like CentraQ Pro.”
The apps allow users to release print jobs from any enabled Kyocera MFP or printer on the network. They can also help protect confidentiality of printed documents, reduce cost of paper and toner supplies by setting print parameters, and providing simplified reporting capabilities to assist with job tracking and usage reports. “Six different types of reports will help IT administrators or dealer service technicians look at an account, look at a deployment of a fleet, and optimize that fleet continually, understanding where and when and how devices are being used in an organization,” explained Wolowitz.
Both apps can support up to 200 devices per print server. The difference between the two apps is that CentraQ does not offer detailed reporting or project reporting while CentraQ PRO does. This detailed reporting and project reporting allows customers to have more visibility on what they’re doing on a regular basis, according to Wolowitz. “You can also restrict access to functions within the device like print, copy or scan, so that you as an IT administrator have more control over that environment,” she adds.
Kyocera’s six standard reports include:
- User Usage Report – Groups usage data by user, allowing administrators to study usage patterns of employees in the company
- Device Usage Report – Groups usage data by device, allowing administrators to view usage by MFP or printer. This is useful when analyzing the effectiveness of the printer and MFP fleet
- User Ranking Report – Ranks users by volume of usage, allowing administrators to quickly identify the top 10 users generating the largest volume of prints, copies, scans, and faxes
- Device Ranking Report – Ranks devices by volume of usage, making it easy to identify over utilized devices for optimizing the fleet
- Billing Code Report – Can be used to view usage related to a business entity based on the reference ID entered
- Job Information Report – Shows detailed information on one or more jobs selected by specifying a job ID. The information is particularly useful for scans and faxes as it shows the destination e-mail addresses and fax numbers
Among the business challenges addressed by the new apps is ensuring that printed, scanned, and stored information remains confidential, adherence to regulatory requirements and internal compliance, promote environmentally responsible printing, develop fleet management strategy by trending user and group print usage; replace overused and reallocate under used devices, implement reporting functionality to help lower operating costs and overhead printing, and track all printers, scans, copies, and faxes for departmental charge backs.
Each device requires a license in order to be tracked. A single CentraQ license has an SRP of $277 while the SRP for a single CentraQ PRO license is $362. Volume pricing packages are available, including 4-Pack and 10-Pack CentraQ licenses, and 4-, 10-, and 40-Pack CentraQ PRO licenses.
One server can handle 200 devices and each Kyocera device requires a device license. Its Windows OS only and designed for single-server environments. For environments with multiple services, the app must be loaded on each server and reporting done separately although reports can all be exported and combined within Excel.
A 90-day trial is available to channel partners, which helps ensure customers are getting the correct solution for their needs. This trial allows partners to install and monitor up to five devices.
