Wiltshire, England (Dec. 16, 2020) — The office printing & imaging industry continues to suffer from a series of issues caused by unintelligent fleet monitoring tools. In recent months, some have even gone to the lengths of developing DCA clustering and embedded clients without actually addressing the fundamental issues from a technological, communications and security perspective.

Most remote service management (RSM) platforms typically use a simple data collection client that is installed within the end-user network environment. However, increasingly they continue to “go-dark” by losing connectivity and dropping business and service critical data, including meter collection information required for accurate and complete billing integrity.

Our native DCA (data processing agent/DPA) client has always used a uniquely exclusive highly encrypted communications technology, which has enabled all EKM users globally to avoid such issues while remaining ahead of their competitors. At EKM we enable you to deliver significantly higher value at much lower operational cost, while using fewer resources, and driving out much more wastage than any other approach.

From version 24 onwards, EKM Global is proud to announce that their MPSaaS Data Collection Agent is now entirely self-healing, taking the already world-class reliability to a whole new level of performance.

Building on the DCA architecture that includes multiple self-optimizing monitoring loops, which have been enhanced to proactively track, process and manage assets, reconciliation of meter billing, consumables, service alerts and media data from office printing and imaging devices.

However, we have again introduced a step change in MPSaaS industry innovation with the following self-healing functions:

Detection of stalled connections (internal and external) with automatic restart of services.
Full integrity checking of configuration and operating parameters periodically during the day, including automatic rollback to last good backup.
Improved DCA status response logging to allow detailed remote diagnostics of any DCA issues.
DCA memory monitor logging, including host system memory and CPU usage statistics allowing remote diagnosis of host issues.

These changes will allow the already most secure and reliable DCA to a whole new level, ensuring that it remains 99.999% operational to
ensure that data is processed consistently and reliably with zero packet loss.

Version 24 also supports macOS and Linux including ARM-based appliances such as the Raspberry Pi.

The EKM Insight DCA already has many advanced features that have formed the core of the data gathering application for the last 20 years. These include:

Multiple self-timing data collection loops including a heartbeat loop and individual loops for assets, meters, consumables, service alerts, media, etc.
Optimized targeted data collection so the data loops only collect information that is required. For example, service alerts are collected more frequently than meters and consumables are collected hourly.
Intelligent DCA that cleans data by processing it at source before sending the data to our MPSaaS cloud portals.
Optimized data transmission, only sending data that is new or has changed.
Full store and forward secure military-grade transmission of data to eliminate loss.
DCA remote management: you never need to configure a DCA locally once it’s connected.

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About EKM Global
EKM Global was established in 2000 as an industry pioneer of multi-brand MPSaaS technologies to enable the industry to deliver higher value at the lowest possible operational cost. Our aim is to always lead by applying relentless technology innovation to conventional business applications in a solid, meticulous, and practical way on behalf of our OEM manufacturer, distributor, volume reseller & service provider clients. EKM has since developed the leading XaaS platform to support the growing trend towards usage-based consumption charging across all technologies to support a $3TN industry. EKM now operates throughout 90 countries across every continent and was acquired by Advanced Technology Trading Company (ATTCo) in July 2018.