German printing software vendor, ThinPrint GmbH, has launched its first operations in the Asia-Pacific region in Sydney, and has wooed several distributors to market its solutions to the reseller channel.
ThinPrint develops printing solutions for server-based, Web-based and mobile computing. Its software completes such tasks as compressing the amount of information sent to across the network for printing. The vendor has a strong presence in Europe and North America, all driven by a 100 % channel model, with 400 distributors and resellers in 48 countries selling its wares.
Sales director for ThinPrint Asia-Pacific, Thorston Hesse, has been transferred from the vendor's Berlin office to establish an office in Sydney and seek out channels in Australia, New Zealand and other ASEAN countries. So far, in Australia, Hesse has signed Infotronics to distribute ThinPrint's product lines, and is in the process of signing another major distributor.
Hesse said ThinPrint's software provided a new solution to an old problem. On server-based networks, printing was often the biggest pain-point.
Printing a simple word file in such an environment creates a spool file that is many times larger than the original file.
The print job for a 700K-byte word file could end up sending as much as 13M bytes of data across the network, he said.
Whereas in a distributed LAN environment, bandwidth is less of an issue, a server-based environment based on Citrix, Unix or Microsoft Terminal Services might require third-party software to manage printing in a more efficient manner, Hesse said.
"Citrix has been developing some solutions in this space over the last five years, but printing is a complicated thing and we do it better," he said. The vendor is offering any Australian reseller that signs up as a partner prior to Easter Monday (April 12) a free one-day technical training session, to be held in Sydney, free of charge.
Hesse has arranged for one of the vendor's technicians to travel to Australia from Germany to conduct this session, and also train up a local representative to provide continuing education in the region.
Hesse recommended that resellers revisit existing clients that had deployed server-based computing environments. He said most would find that customers do have printing issues and would be attracted to the prospect of reducing the print-related data that moved across their networks by rates as high as 50 %.
Hesse also said that ThinPrint solutions were a higher margin sell when including Citrix or other thin-client software in a pilot or pitch for a new customer.