Tricerat: Print Management Solutions that Bypass IT Limitations

Meet John Byrne. A gadget freak, race car enthusiast and a hi-tech fanatic, who has a passionate flair for well-crafted products that runs on cutting edge technology. As an active member of automobile communities, Byrne is either busy driving his posh yellow Lamborghini Murcielago, determined to break his own record of 195 miles per hour, or brainstorming with likeminded people about new technologies. “Technology, like my car is out on a fast ride in the market, constantly changing track with the trends,” says Byrne. Byrne has spent the greater part of his life cultivating an obsession with software and new technology. After graduating from Sellinger School of Business at Loyola College of Maryland, Byrne worked for Mercantile Bank for a decade, successfully directing the transformation of the bank’s software infrastructure to Citrix Mainframe. It was during this process, he realized the apparent lack of softwares to efficiently manage print connections and operations in an organization. Byrne’s entrepreneurial zest and his addiction for perfection drove him to craft an innovative solution for the industry—Tricerat.

“There has been tremendous growth in print technology over the last decade to support remote printing,” says Byrne. Tricerat was one of the pioneers to recognize this. “Tricerat is riding the mighty waves of change. We were the first to initiate the universal driver technology in 2001, to eliminate pesky printer driver and 32 and 64-bit compatibility issues in server-based, virtual, or workstation environments,” says Byrne.

Screwdrivers to Simplify Printing Using the universal driver technology, the developers at Tricerat wanted to create a unique print protocol to speed up remote printing and to improve server performance, resulting in minimal spool crashes. Thus, they came up with ScrewDrivers, a simple plug ‘n’ play remote desktop solution, which employs driverless technology to mirror print drivers from the network print server, bypassing the user’s end point entirely.

ScrewDrivers technology is compatible for both 32 and 64-bit systems and supports Trimeta file format, the company’s very own invention, which enhances the outcome of printed materials in terms of quality and speed. Most companies either use file formats like Enhanced Metafile (EMF) or Portable Document Format (PDF), which takes up large amount of space on the network. Trimeta file format is highly compressed and speeds up the process ten times, fueled by the company’s universal print drivers. “If you were to use universal drivers from Microsoft, which comes with standard windows file formats, in many cases the printout is not what you expect. Problems like half printed documents and bad rendering of texts and images in the printed documents are persistent. But Trimeta grabs the information right from the printer driver and formats it on the file; into the fidelity it was intended. With this, the print out will be exactly what you expect,” explains Byrne. “No crashes. No lost print jobs. Just printing from any application to any available printer,” adds Byrne.

Sold through direct distributors as well as resellers, today, the revenue potential for Screwdriver stands at $250Million. The product comes in two types of licenses; a perpetual fee which is a one-time payment with yearly maintenance charge for technical support. There is also a monthly based subscription model fee released recently on popular demand.

Progress towards “All things Mobile” With the advent of Bring Your Own Device trend, Byrne realized that Tricerat’s immediate future was in solving mobile printing problems. He steered the company along a massive, 18 month project and launched Simplify Printing TX, a simple, trouble-free mobile print solution that enables users to print from any device to any printer in any environment. “A large development team was involved in setting up Simplify Printing TX from the scratch, since there were no applications that would support mobile printing prior to ours. Users can now print from any platforms like Windows OS, iOS or Android, and can access printers through any devices, including iPhones and iPads, without intervention from the system admin,” says Byrne. Simplify Printing TX also supports collating, stapling and other advanced features which the software incorporates automatically.

We believe that system administrators should have more time to spend on strategic and meaningful company initiatives. So our mantra is to simplify the lives of IT administrators by automating the low key tasks, associated with management

Additionally, using this solution, the company intends to give instant print access to customers in sectors like healthcare. “Through integrating various mobile health apps with the Simplify Monitoring solution, users can instantly get print access to their daily health track sheet.

Thus by building a networked management for simplified monitoring, we aim to bring about an option for native print solution on all mobile applications,” says Byrne.

Tricerat is also adapting their desktop based ScrewDrivers technology as a native print solution for mobility in order to achieve direct interaction between a printer and a mobile device, eliminating the hassle of printers downloading documents prior to printing. This native device interface is achieved through installing a free, click-to-print app on iPads and iPhones, which displays a windows printer dialog box fetched from the print server, enabling direct interaction with server. Thus, users have the complete administrator control on printers, helping them to keep track of what is being printed along with a locking system, which provides security for the documents sent for print.

Strategic Alliances

By developing simple and effective software, Tricerat has been able to solve IT network problems of over 8,000 customers worldwide and create many invaluable partnerships with value-added resellers, consultants, and systems integrators. Particularly with Citrix, Tricerat has been maintaining a long-standing partnership since its inception. “Our partnership with Citrix has enabled us to stay synced with keeping track on current technology and moreover, our print solutions are designed to be ‘Citrix Ready’,” says Byrne. Tricerat’s Simplify Monitoring solution provides out-of-the-box functionality and setup wizards that enable administrators to monitor their virtual application delivery deployments such as Citrix-based XenApp and XenDesktop, to determine root causes and automate fix actions.

Tricerat also partners with HP, Xerox and Canon and has formed critical industry alliances with VMware and Microsoft to implement network virtualization for their print solutions. Tricerat’s products are popular among corporate customers like AIG, Duke Energy, and many others in verticals including aerospace and healthcare.

Huntsville Hospital, one of the largest public healthcare systems in the country with 5,800 employees and over 600 remote physicians who make multiple print requests every day, was in need of a third party solution to manage their print operations. Several print management solutions were considered, but all failed to fully satisfy what Huntsville Hospital needed: a solution that could be implemented without tech intervention and additional connectivity; with custom printer names, and also is cost effective. “Tricerat’s solution guaranteed limited IT intervention during the printer installation process and did not need additional connectivity. ScrewDrivers v4 for the Remote Desktop was extremely easy to install, had the best configuration options, and provided the crucial custom printer naming option,” says Shawn Scott, Network Specialist and ScrewDrivers project leader for Huntsville Hospital.

Overcoming Marketing Challenges

When it comes to marketing their simplified Printing Solutions, Tricerat meets three types of challenges. First is finding the right distributors and resellers for products. “To ensure proper software distribution, we constantly communicate with our resellers and distributors on daily basis, offer webinars to showcase in which market segments our products stand better than the others in terms of efficiency and pricing,” says Byrne. Second is the complexity involved with a mobile environment—as increasing numbers of people go for myriad of mobile environments, system engineers are challenged on daily basis to keep track and resolve issues for Tricerat’s products, flagged by the users. “Our development team responds to every issue flagged in rapid fashion and we constantly update and enhance our features. We also provide technical information of the same on our website to help everybody to follow the roll up,” says Byrne. Lastly, the pressure on software pricing, which Tricerat addresses with its subscription based pricing strategy.

Tricerat also maintains a communication suite with more than 10,000 system administrators across the U.S., in order to bring about simplicity for their IT concerns. “We believe that system administrators should have more time to spend on strategic and meaningful company initiatives. By paying attention to system administrators, we strive to improve our tools to not only simplify their tasks, but also for the betterment of end-user experience,” asserts Byrne.

Future Course for Tricerat Tricerat is getting ready for the future with new and innovative developments including implementation of Apple’s iBeacon technology, a low-powered Bluetooth support into the company’s upcoming solutions.

“We are also working around location based printing, which will allow the users to walk into a room with their mobile device, scan and locate available printers in the vicinity and send their files virtually to have them printed in no time,” notes Byrne. For someone who is a tech and race car aficionado, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if a day arrive when Byrne would develop integration between Tricerat’s Simplify Printing solutions and the iOS supported dashboard of his yellow Lamborghini Murcielago—enabling printing even at 195 miles per hour!