Posted by Jordan Pusey
No organization sets out with the goal of creating print server sprawl. It’s something that happens gradually.
Take the National Widget Company. They started off with a single print server. That’s it—just one. Then they bought out a competitor, merged with a former partner and purchased new facilities to accommodate their expanding workforce. With each new development, they acquired more infrastructure and more end users, which they supported by deploying additional print servers. Now, given all the time they spend managing print servers, it seems like they’re in the print management business rather than the widget business.
Sound familiar?
That’s a pretty common tale for distributed organizations. Unless they’re already firmly wedded to a centralized print server model, they tend to deploy additional print servers for the sake of ease and expedience. But that can quickly lead to diminishing returns, because each new piece of infrastructure involves costs associated with print server management. There’s the cost of purchase, maintenance, licensing and upgrade on the hardware side, and the cost of licensing, deployment, administration and migration on the software side. Print server sprawl certainly isn’t cheap.
Nor is it convenient. With each new print server comes the same old frustrations: a lack of visibility into the print environment, poor driver management, fragile print spoolers, limited self-installation options, frustrated end users making calls to the helpdesk, downtime.
Once organizations grow tired of all that headache, the centralized print server model starts to look pretty appealing. Yet that model that has many, many drawbacks of its own, including complete reliance on the WAN. And that highlights the fact that a centralized print server is one big single point of failure that requires expensive redundancy measures.
So how can you eliminate print server sprawl and the ongoing hassle of managing print servers without simply trading it all in for a solution that’s just as flawed?
PrinterLogic is a unique print management solution that fuses the proven reliability of direct IP printing with the unprecedented ease of centralized management. It stops print server sprawl immediately because it enables your organization to eliminate print servers completely, regardless of your wider environment. Citrix? VMware? RDP? Globally distributed? Highly mobile/BYOD? Healthcare with strict EMR/EHR requirements? PrinterLogic not only supports those diverse environments, it integrates seamlessly with each of them to either replace or enhance your existing enterprise printing solution.
According to one survey of 333 verified PrinterLogic customers (TVID: 77B-13B-830), the independent research firm TechValidate found that nearly 80% of those customers were able to reduce their remote infrastructure by 30% or more through our print management solution. Another survey of close to 400 verified PrinterLogic customers (TVID: 539-304-868) determined that 83% of them had reduced time spent on print management by 30% or more as a result of implementing our solution—and reduced infrastructure played no small part in that. Instead of concentrating on managing print servers and print-related damage control, they were focusing on their core business and enjoying impressive ROI.
Among many other features, such as our user-friendly self-service installation portal and the ability to deploy printers without resorting to scripts and GPOs, PrinterLogic’s centralized management console stands out on account of its ease of use. Unlike the continued pains of print server management, the console allows you to make individual or bulk changes to printers, profiles and drivers in real time with just a few intuitive clicks.
And with PrinterLogic’s implementation options, there’s just no longer any excuse for print server sprawl. You can go with our on-premises solution or opt for our next-generation cloud-based solution, PrinterCloud, which brings many of the same practical advantages plus the flexibility of a zero-footprint, software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
Whichever you choose, your days of managing print servers and fighting their sprawl are over.