Wouter Koelewijn, CPO
3 min read
Oscar Wilde said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” If that is the case, call us extremely flattered.
We see competitors (and the industry at large) following in our footsteps. On the one hand, it is good to know we are on the right track, leading the pack, and have made big bets in the right places. On the other hand, we need to step back and acknowledge where we have been first to market with new innovations.
As a small or large business trying to decide where to place your bets when procuring print solutions, do you want to do business with an innovator or a follower? Would you rather associate with a company that is constantly thinking about how best to serve you or one that waits to be asked?
When we started drawing up the list, it was clear that our accomplishments fall into three innovation categories: business, technology, and product. The graphic below shows this. We call them Y Soft Firsts.
As a small or large business trying to decide where to place your bets when procuring print solutions, do you want to do business with an innovator or a follower? Would you rather associate with a company that is constantly thinking about how best to serve you or one that waits to be asked?
When we started drawing up the list, it was clear that our accomplishments fall into three innovation categories: business, technology, and product. The graphic below shows this. We call them Y Soft Firsts.
Y SOFT BUSINESS INNOVATIONS
Those who stand still will soon not be heard from again. The business world is littered with companies who fail to innovate. Innovation takes many forms, and business innovation is often overlooked. Not anymore.
- Y Soft Ventures—In the corporate venture space, we are the only print management/document capture provider that invests in early technology start-ups. Why is this important? These start-ups are using cutting-edge technology such as AI and Machine Learning, which have applications in areas such as print security.
Working closely with them as we do, together we can create new features and bring additional value to the industry. - YSoft Labs—We’ve dedicated resources to experiment with new technology and out-of-the-box ideas. This is how our robotic quality assurance testing started. Today, RQA is part of our hardware and software testing, making our products the highest quality on the market.
- Subscription Model—Analysts have been saying for years that the world is moving toward subscription models. And when our industry is trending toward cloud-based solutions, knowing a thing or two about offering print management and document capture on subscription is handy. I've been there, done that.
Y SOFT TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS
If you do not invest in new technologies or new ways of thinking, you will forever be following the lead of others. Following is just not in our DNA.
- Edge Computing—The trend toward cloud-based print management sometimes requires edge computing to handle the rough edges that cloud services don’t handle well (latency, bandwidth costs, data security/privacy).
- CBPR—Cloud-Based Print Roaming is an extended version of our Print Roaming, known as pull-printing. We know customers desire to reduce server dependency, and CBPR helps in this area.
- MOPRIA print server—You may not know it, but if you print from an Android device, you are using our SafeQ technology. That’s because we are heavily involved in creating mobile print standards with the MOPRIA industry group, amongst other industry associations and consortiums. You won’t find our competitors anywhere near us as we contribute time, talent, and resources so customers can be productive and businesses can be efficient by using industry standards and protocols. Who's got your back?
- Cloud-Based Print Management—We blew the lid off this one for the SMB market. Edge-based technology is already in place and being tested around the globe for our cloud-based print management service. There’s more to come on this one. We also laid out our cloud-first strategy.
Y SOFT PRODUCT INNOVATIONS
Product innovations are where you put your money where your mouth is. Technology is all fine and dandy, but what can I do with it? It all comes down to delivering products. Here are a few of Y Soft Firsts in the product innovation category.
- Integrated Platform—We were the first in 2016 to do it. Fully and completely. Not just on the surface but under the hood – we built the SAFEQ platform from scratch as one integrated platform with our building block architecture. Underlying systems that support across the platform, one contract, one support line.
- 3D Print Management—We bought a 3D printing company to truly understand how they work and how to integrate print management with them. Print management has some great features that are significantly useful in education, and we have focused on bringing 3D printing skills to a new generation of innovators. We see the value of print management across a broad spectrum of 3D printers and industries.
- OCR—Optical Character Recognition. Our competitors have finally come around to this, but no one has the text highlighting and text redaction features that we do. Customers continue to be amazed at the power these features bring to their businesses.
- Mobile App—No, mobile apps are not new, but no ISV has one. This demonstrates how seriously we take mobile printing and making employees as productive as possible. There is a lot more to be done in this area, and we’ll enjoy seeing how the market responds.
- Universal Card Reader—this is unique in that it is the first universal card reader, meaning it can read hundreds of different card technologies. Previously, our partners had to carry various card reader models, as card readers only supported certain technologies. A couple of patents are pending on this one, so it's not as easy to copy these innovations.
Bragging aside, we are proud of our contributions to the print management and document capture industry. We feel good about our ability to continue to out-innovate and out-deliver the competition.
