You probably don’t need me to tell you that mobile printing is piping hot right now, if not in practice in conversation. Most printer and MFP manufacturers seem to be addressing mobility in one way or another and mobile printing capability is rapidly approaching must-have, value-add status.
Aside from the printer and MFP manufacturers who continue to do their own thing in the mobile printing space, there are a growing number of companies focused on mobile print as well. One company that is raising the profile of mobile printing is Breezy (www.breezy.com).
The company—same name, same product—bills Breezy as the world’s most secure mobile print platform. The Breezy app allows users to print from their mobile devices and also send faxes. In the works is the capability to receive faxes on the devices.
According to Breezy’s Website, Breezy was built from the ground up to be completely secure and provides the simplest user experience of any mobile printing app. It incorporates an API that manages millions of requests per week from users around the world. Breezy technology also allows developers to add print functionality to their own apps, enabling users to print directly to any Breezy-enabled printer without requiring the Breezy app to be installed.
Breezy was founded in 2009 by Jared Hansen, Breezy’s CEO. He credits his wife with coming up with the name “Breezy”: they were sitting around the kitchen table trying to come up with words that related to easy and cloud-based printing, and voila, Breezy did it.
Breezy is primarily focused on the enterprise, but has a number of small business users and tens of thousands of individual consumers who have downloaded the Breezy apps from the App Store. Most people find the app by searching for print-related apps.
“As one of our investors put it, our consumer apps are a highly visible business card for our real business, which is enabling secure mobile print in the enterprise,” states Hansen. “Our apps are highly rated on Android, IOS, and Blackberry so we get a lot of visibility just from that. We integrate with a number of other applications as well, and one of the distinguishing features of Breezy as a mobile print solution is that everything we’ve done is built on an open API that other applications can use.”
Hansen and company have high aspirations.
“Instead of just being the most popular print app out there, we want to be the print infrastructure for all of the other mobile apps,” he says. “We believe the easiest way to translate something from digital to physical is by tapping a button with a picture of a printer on it.”
That’s the Breezy Button. Application developers for iOS and Android can embed this button in their own applications in order to enable secure printing through the Breezy infrastructure.
“That’s driven a significant amount of business as well because we’ve integrated with top apps like Box [online file sharing] and Touchdown, which is one of the top providers of Microsoft Exchange e-mail on Android devices, as well as a number of others,” reports Hansen.
Traditionally, Breezy has received most of its visibility from people searching the app store. That’s begun to change and they’re now seeing more new accounts from people who found the app because they printed from Breezy using a different app. Breezy also has a small inside sales force targeting the enterprise.
While the app store is a great way to target individual users, and the internal sales force is making some headway into the enterprise, Breezy has recently begun working with resellers as well. They have an affiliate program where dealers can sell Breezy licenses, and the program has a couple of different tiers. If a dealer just wants to connect a customer or prospect interested in mobile printing via Breezy, they make that introduction to Breezy and then get paid a referral fee. More commonly, since dealers are providing service to their client base already, they’ll provide Breezy mobile printing as part of their solutions offerings, making the sale and setting the customer up on Breezy. For that they receive a higher commission fee.
Asked what makes the Breezy mobile printing app unique, Hansen starts with the end user experience.
“We’ve put a lot of time and attention into making it a consumer-grade user experience,” he says. “There’s a tradition in enterprise software that the people at the top buy the software and everybody else has to use it — but this is becoming less and less viable as a business model. The old model isn’t going to fly for every long with people who expect a higher quality of user experience in their devices. We’ve put a lot of focus on user experience and design, and that’s one of the primary things users point out that’s different from other applications.”
From the enterprise point of view, he says the number one differentiator is Breezy’s security model.
“It’s the best in the industry,” boasts Hansen. “We’re the only one that has a cloud-printing solution that is fully encrypted as your document transits through the system. We’ve passed security audits from some of the most security conscious organizations in the world, including a Fortune 500 pharma company, and two of the world’s top 5 law firms, and a number of others. These organizations put vendors through the ringer in terms of security, and we’ve passed muster at these firms because we’ve developed [the app] from the ground up to have everything locked down, yet and flexible enough to allow administrators a high degree of control over what and where users are allowed to print.”
Setting up Breezy in a corporate environment is similar to the process that Breezy’s individual users go through on their home PCs. It takes about 10 minutes.
“Even in the very largest of organizations we can deploy in a short period of time—well under an hour, whereas many of the competing products require a consultant has to come out to your office and spend a couple of afternoons messing with your Exchange server. It’s just a giant pain. Our security, ease of use for the end user, and lower overhead and installation, are probably the three biggest reasons Breezy is unique,” says Hansen.
The way the app is priced is also different from other mobile printing solutions. It’s on a per-user, per-year basis, and
it doesn’t matter how many printers an organization has or how much printing they do.
“The reason for pricing this way is that larger organizations may have thousands of printers, but it may make sense to have their top executives print to each of those printers,” explains Hansen. “But if you’re paying $500-$2,000 to get your printers mobile enabled, that’s not cost effective in many cases. With per-user pricing, companies can start with whoever they think will profit most from this, and as their mobile deployments grow and people become more mobile in the organization, they can add new licenses.”
One of the keys to mobile printing is being able to print whenever and from wherever you are. Enter the Breezy Partner Network. Breezy’s agreements with EFI, Fedex Office, and various copy and print centers allow mobile workers throughout North America to easily find Breezy Partner Network locations where they can print. In many locations, the user can pull up a GPS map which shows their location and the five closest partner locations. The user selects the location, and their document will be sent securely to that location where they can then retrieve it.
“Once you submit a document to one of our partner locations you’ll get a release code in the app, and when you go to the partner location you enter that code on a piece of hardware at that location in order to release your document,” notes Hansen.
Breezy has also forged some critical partnerships within the mobile device world, including with Good, a provider of mobile device management services and secure e-mail.
Hansen acknowledges that competition is plentiful.
“Every print vendor in the last couple of years has woken up and realized they’re going to have to do something about mobile [printing], and there are numerous app companies that make print apps as well. That said, in our view of the market, there is a wide variance in quality between different applications so it’s important to review solutions carefully before choosing what to roll out.”
As with any solution or app, expect the Breezy app to continue to evolve, first with inbound faxing which will be introduced in the next couple of months.
“We’re also going to be adding AirPrint support soon, and we’ll be expanding our relationship with Good via a Good Dynamics integration. There are also a number of other cool things coming towards the end of the year or early next, but it’s too early to describe these in detail,” Hansen said.
Hansen concludes with a rosy view of the mobile print market: “Look, paper isn’t going away anytime soon, but laptops and desktops—at least as the primary mode of computing—are. As the world accelerates toward mobility, mobile print will increasingly be synonymous with print itself so we think this market is a great place to be.”
