Today’s product launch by HP is impressive
as the company’s printer group continues with their sharp customer focus. This
carries over from the Instant Ink announcement I covered early this month (see “More inkjet customer focus – HP eliminates anxiety"
In the LaserJet/Security case, rather than the end-user, their customer is the IT manager and
product specifier. These individuals, as HP and their research characterize them, are ever more concerned about the security of their networks and the nodes on those networks - which include many Enterprise-grade printers and MFPs. HP hired Ponemon Institute to survey more than 2,000 IT security practitioners in North America, EMEA, Asia-Pac and Latin America to help guide their development and launch of the new security solutions, which are also backwards compatible with devices manufactured by HP as long ago as 2011.
For a great story with more details on the solution, I highly recommend "The Best New Defense in Cyber-Security can be found on - Printers", by Arthur Q. Choi in Popular Science.
For a great story with more details on the solution, I highly recommend "The Best New Defense in Cyber-Security can be found on - Printers", by Arthur Q. Choi in Popular Science.
Included with HP’s launch of three new enterprise class
LaserJet printers today are what the company refers to as “built-in
self-healing security features with protection down to the BIOS”. And while this quote (from the sub-head of the
press release) seems a little jargon-heavy, reading down the press release a
couple of lines, we find these much more customer-friendly statements (attributed
to Tuan Tran, HP’s vice president and general manager, LaserJet and Enterprise
Solutions business), “Protecting against security breaches is one of the biggest challenges our customers
face…HP is helping customers secure their devices, documents and data by
defending our enterprise printers with the strongest protection in the
industry.” (My bolds.)
During my long involvement with the tech industry,
particularly from the hardware side, it is always challenging to move the
internal interest in product development and launch from centering on the
latest in terms of “speeds and feeds” – i.e. new hardware features – to solutions
and meaningful customer benefits. With this announcement from HP, and others that have
recently impressed me (and to be fair, other industry
incumbents like Epson – see "Epson's New SuperTank Printers aim at customer pain points"), the printing and imaging industry is showing a great deal of customer focus and savvy.
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