PaperCut: Managing Printing-The Cost Effective Way

With the advent of cloud technology, there has been a huge demand for remote printers as they made it feasible to retrieve virtual data in the physical format. This has lead to an incautious use of paper resource, resulting in excess print paper wastage.

To put an end to this unfair extravagance, Chris Dance, a graduate Mechanical engineer, switched his industry to software, and in 1998, came up with PaperCut, a print quota application software with a key focus to bring in a marginal reduction to printer waste. “The idea of PaperCut hit me when I was working as a network technician at a local high school, during my University days. Since print paper was free of cost, I saw students abusing the opportunity, which resulted in a lot of print paper going to waste. So when we put a cost quota on paper use, we could see a major behavioral change in students, as they started utilizing print paper responsibly. As a result, we witnessed 20 to 30 percent reduction in overall printer waste within the organization,” recalls Chris.

Recently there has been a major shift in the printing industry, driven mainly by remote printing and the Bring Your Own Device trend. Customers now seek more options and interoperability to printing solutions. No matter how big their organization is, customer’s demand for instant access to technology never wavers. “Organizations not only want to control print usage, but also want integration and unification of printers with every available device. Thus, we approach the market through integrating our print quota application software to mobile devices, in order to support the current BYOD trend,” says Chris.

With headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and offices in U.S. and U.K., PaperCut’s market is spread across more than 100 countries and over 50,000 customers ranging from education institutions, government sectors, police forces, space agencies and corporate organizations.

The large customer network is managed through 2 different market avenues. The first one is the internet version, where PaperCut offers a trial version of their software for direct download. The second is a channel distributor product, which is more advanced and comes with additional features such as embedded firmware for Multi-Function Devices (MFDs) for a more customized approach.

PaperCut is in every way technology agnostic. Their cross-platform functionality not only supports various operating systems such as Linux, Mac, Novell and Windows but alsosupports all major mobile platforms, and printer devices. By supporting all of the popular printer and copier brands that customers use, PaperCut is able to serve a broad range of industries. Their business plan consists of a distributed model, which delivers their print solutions beyond the educational core market and into corporate customers. “When it comes to corporate environment, it is hard to apply the cost quota concept as its mainly about getting feasibility of information and so the motivation of saving paper varies from different individuals,” says Chris. Hence corporate organizations use PaperCut’s print management solution which automatically tracks employee usage, either individually or departmentwise and delivers explicit reports on overall budget consumption and the resulting impact on the environment.

For PaperCut, innovation is mainly driven by the current trends in the printing industry. Through channelization and working closely with partners such as local print manufacturers, PaperCut has ascended its way towards success. Going forward, apart from implementing a greener aspect to saving print paper and integrating their software to support BYOD trends, PaperCut has also started shifting their entire print management infrastructure data to a private cloud. The company has also partnered with Google Cloud Print platform in order to enable their product reach to a larger customer-base.