Y Soft Firsts

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 how best to serve you or one who waits to be asked?

When we started drawing up the list, it was clear that there are three innovation categories our accomplishments fall into: business, technology and product. The graphic below shows this. We call them Y Soft Firsts. Let’s look at each category.

Y Soft Business Innovations

Those who stand still are soon not heard from again. The business world is littered with companies who failed 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, we can learn and use their technology to create new features and bring additional value to our products and services.
• YSoft Labs – We’ve dedicated resources that can experiment with new technology and out of the box ideas. It’s how our robotic quality assurance testing started. And today, RQA is part of our hardware and software testing making our products the highest quality on the market.
• GOE – Short for Global Operational Excellence Framework. Implementing print management/document capture solutions in 42% of the Global Fortune 500 means we know how to do big, complex deployments well. It doesn’t happen by itself. It takes a disciplined set of processes, tools and closed-loop feedback to ensure customers are deployed on time, on budget and as expected. It’s what we do.
• 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 on how to offer print management and document capture on subscription is handy. Been there, done that.

Y Soft Technology Innovations

If you are not investing in new technologies, new ways of thinking, then 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 needs edge computing to handle the rough edges that cloud services don’t handle well (latency, bandwidth costs, data security/privacy.) Good thing we’ve had an edge device, YSoft SAFEQube since 2008. You won’t want to trust your cloud print management system to an edge newbie.
• CBPR – Cloud Based Print Roaming is an extended version of our Print Roaming, known as pull-printing. We know about 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 industry group MOPRIA, 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. Whose 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 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. No doubt our competitors are pouring over it and scrambling to catch up. That’s ok. We didn’t spill the beans on everything.

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’s a few of Y Soft Firsts in the product innovation category.

 

• Integrated Platform – For many this is a trendy term to use in their marketing materials. 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. It has served us well as we continue to build upon the platform with new feature sets and products, such as YSoft SAFEQEdge Core, currently in beta.
• 3D Print Management – We giggled when we saw this on a competitor’s website. 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 where we have focused on to bring 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 come around to this finally. 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 business. Read more about our OCR capabilities in this handy eBook.
• Mobile App – No, mobile apps are not new, but no ISV has one. It 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 a recent announcement from Y Soft, our USB Card Reader 3 MFX. It’s unique in that it is the first card reader that is universal, 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 sets of technologies. Couple of patents pending on this one, so 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. Want to know more, reach out to any of our local Y Soft staff in your area. You can find them here.