Cisco, Xerox join for mobile printing

Cisco Systems has teamed up with Xerox to create a mobile printing system that lets users print from any device to any printer.

The companies plan to make printing faster and easier for employees on the move, adding software to routers and switches to make the process faster and more secure. Cisco channel partners will resell the technology and a managed service that will be delivered by Xerox from a data center built with Cisco's UCS (Unified Computing System) servers, the companies are announcing on Monday.

With mobile printing, an employee can send a document from a smartphone, tablet or other device to a service that will make that document available to every printer in an organization. The employee can then go to one of those printers, punch in the code for that document, and have it printed out. This could overcome a problem caused by the growing adoption of both mobile devices and virtual desktops in enterprises, said Forrester Research analyst Rob Whiteley. Printing is often overlooked, he said.

"The appetite to implement those types of changes is very high ... and then, lo and behold, things like print quickly become one of the things that just flat out don't work, or they do work, but there has to be some kind of complex workaround," Whiteley said.

A typical ad hoc method for getting a document printed from a mobile device is to e-mail it to someone who sits near a printer and have them print it out, he said. Besides being awkward and time-consuming, this may bypass company security policies governing who can view or store a document.

Printing from mobile devices is increasing in importance as more users rely on phones and tablets, but the technology is still in its infancy, said IDC analyst Angele Boyd.

"The infrastructure barely exists today," Boyd said.

Xerox introduced a mobile printing system earlier this year, but left it up to enterprises or system integrators to deploy and configure. Other vendors, including Cisco rival Hewlett-Packard, have also introduced such systems. The idea behind the partnership between Xerox and Cisco is to bring the network into the picture.

10 Reasons Enterprises Aren't Ready to Trust the Cloud

Many entrepreneurs today have their heads in the clouds. They’re either outsourcing most of their network infrastructure to a provider such as Amazon Web Services or are building out such infrastructures to capitalize on the incredible momentum around cloud computing. I have no doubt that this is The Next Big Thing in computing, but sometimes I get a little tired of the noise. Cloud computing could become as ubiquitous as personal computing, networked campuses or other big innovations in the way we work, but it’s not there yet.

Because as important as cloud computing is for startups and random one-off projects at big companies, it still has a long way to go before it can prove its chops. So let’s turn down the noise level and add a dose of reality. Here are 10 reasons enterprises aren’t ready to trust the cloud. Startups and SMBs should pay attention to this as well.

1. It’s not secure. We live in an age in which 41 percent of companies employ someone to read their workers’ email. Certain companies and industries have to maintain strict watch on their data at all times, either because they’re regulated by laws such as HIPAA, Gramm-Leach Bliley Act or because they’re super paranoid, which means sending that data outside company firewalls isn’t going to happen.
2. It can’t be logged. Tied closely to fears of security are fears that putting certain data in the cloud makes it hard to log for compliance purposes. While there are currently some technical ways around this, and undoubtedly startups out there waiting to launch their own products that make it possible to log “conversations” between virtualized servers sitting in the cloud, it’s still early days.
3. It’s not platform agnostic. Most clouds force participants to rely on a single platform or host only one type of product. Amazon Web Services is built on the LAMP stack, Google Apps Engine locks users into proprietary formats, and Windows lovers out there have GoGrid for supporting computing offered by the ServePath guys. If you need to support multiple platforms, as most enterprises do, then you’re looking at multiple clouds. That can be a nightmare to manage.