Y Soft Corporation acquires Equitrac Systems of Australia

Y Soft Corporation is pleased to announce the acquisition of Equitrac Systems of Australia.

Despite the similarity in name between Equitrac Systems and the Equitrac products offered by Nuance, there is no financial link between the two companies. Equitrac Systems of Australia was a distributor of rival products, and will be rebranded as Y Soft Australia in the coming period.
 
“This acquisition presents us with an interesting opportunity to quickly expand our team in the APAC region. This will allow us to maintain a consistent level of quality for the services we offer, despite the significant increase in customers and sales opportunities that we have gained in this region over the past year,” said Vaclav Muchna, CEO of Y Soft Corporation. “We are currently working on integrating the new company into our global organizational structure.”
 
Until now, Equitrac Systems of Australia was Y Soft Corporation’s competitor in the distribution of print management solutions in Australia. Y Soft is to acquire 100% of the shares of Equitrac Systems of Australia. Y Soft Corporation’s sales revenues for the previous fiscal year were more than 23.5 million USD, and those of Equitrac Systems of Australia totaled more than 9.9 million USD.
 
The acquisition will mean changes to the former Equitrac Systems of Australia and its customers. As Muchna said, “We’ll start the process by renaming the company, which will now be known as Y Soft Australia. It will be dedicated to the sales, support, and distribution of its parent company’s products, specifically the print systems management solution, YSoft SafeQ, which helps companies reduce costs, improve user convenience, and enhance security. We will offer existing customers the opportunity to switch over to YSoft SafeQ products free of charge and provide assistance with installation either right away or in the near future. Terms for providing support to customers who wish to stay with their current products will be negotiated with Nuance, producer of the Equitrac solution.”

“It is with the utmost delight that my team and I join Y Soft“ said Phil Heafey, the founder of Equitrac Systems of Australia. “With over 12 years of experience in the output management and cost recover industry, our small team has outperformed many organisations with more manpower and resources as we have focussed on understanding market needs, then delivering to them what it needs.  Now we are teamed with Y Soft, with a global labour force, industry  leading R&D and a management team that is highly skilled, motivated and entrepreneurial,  I anticipate Y Soft will become the global leader in the not too distant future.”
 
Milan Fujita, who is responsible for the Asia-Pacific region in Y Soft Corporation’s top-level management team, adds: “Last year we pre-negotiated a number of new deals across the region. Training new staff at an adequate rate is very complex and time consuming, but thanks to this acquisition we have boosted our team with ten people who have long-term experience in our particular field. We hope that this will be received as a positive signal by all our customers, and by our partners in particular.”

Originally posted on YSoft.com

Nuance launches major upgrade to Equitrac

Version 5 of Equitrac, the print accounting and security software suite is being launched this week, two years after Equitrac was aquired by Nuance.   There are new versions of both the Office version (aimed at businesses) and the Express version (aimed at educational establishments).  The Professional edition, aimed primarily at the original customer base, has already been upgraded to version 5, and is not being further upgraded in this phase.

The main new feature of Equitrac 5 is the feature allowing users to use either the normal server print queues, or to use the new I-Queue.  Based on a client-side application, I-Queue processes print jobs on the workstation.  A mixture of server and workstation print processing is possible.

Many users only need basic printing options – number of prints, color/monochrome, mono/duplex.  With these users in mind, I-Queue has been designed to be simple to use and at the same time to offer a broad reach.  The single “unversal” print driver holds print jobs unprocessed on the workstation until the user pulls them from any printer configured within the system (Equitrac refers to this instance of pull printing as “Follow You” printing).  When the print job is released in Follow-You mode, I-Queue on the workstation checks the printing requirements, and if the appropriate driver is not installed, it downloads it, installs it and configures it automatically.  This should make printing really easy for users (who will not have to think about which print server or which printers are installed on their PCs), and should also reduce the time IT departments have to spend on print driver installs and updates.  Network traffic is also reduced:  there is no traffic until a job is pulled down.  

Another new feature in Equitrac 5 is the web-based interface for managing users, departments and re-billing codes.  Since management is done through a browser, a much wider variety of devices can be used – and without needing the full Equitrac System Manager to be installed (though it is still required for device configuration). 

Among the other interesting features in this new product, worth noting are the new environmental reports – now a standard requirement of this type of software – and the web-release of print jobs which has been extended to support browsers on mobile devices.  A user can release print jobs by using his or her smartphone or tablet to read the QR code stuck on the side of the printer, which opens the printjob release screen of the printer.  This feature does require the Web Release option, but it obviates the need for user authentication devices (badge readers) and so forth.  Companies wishing to account for all such printing activity can still use the module installed on the printing device (assuming compatibility).

This new version of Equitrac does not support Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP.

 

Article originally posted on DataMaster