Why is Beacon important to Pharos? Beacon represents a new and flexible technology platform going forward. It is characterized by real-time data, speed, simplicity, efficiency and elegance. It allows us to better serve our customers, while dramatically shifting how resources are used – both ours and those of our customers. Technology installation, support, updates, data collection, aggregation and analysis have been a large investment for solutions providers and for our customers. What took weeks and months to accomplish is now done in minutes and hours.
We believe that vendor controlled data and periodic reporting are being replaced by real-time decision-support with big data and analytics available to vendors, channels and customers simultaneously. Equally important is Beacon’s scalability – up and down – to allow us to participate in a broader market than we have historically. Simple cloud analytics is ideal for the SMB and dealer market and allows further penetration of our Pharos-inside, white label services to the manufacturers.
Why is Beacon important to your customers and to the market in general? Our customers will benefit in three primary ways: Reduced infrastructure and cost, real-time data access to critical information linking users, documents and devices, and bringing all of this together within a single worldwide community.
Our customers have been looking to simplify and reduce infrastructure. The cloud is resetting expectations for speed and cost. We have worked with our largest customers to streamline the technology – from installation to support and updates. Currently our customers are installing Beacon with little to no involvement of Pharos people – and no addition of servers.
User behavior modification and overall change management in printing depends upon the need for real time access to big data analytics, better metric tracking – real-time. This enables a new level of customer service directly for those who provide managed print, and in other cases, a new level of service for the do-it-yourself customer. The customer will now be able to answer (in real time) how much they print, by how many users, at what cost, by application, by color, by duplex, with how many devices, with job detail and with green metrics. All this information will be available on the Beacon dashboard. Additional drill down to the most basic elements represents a leap for the market in terms of knowledge transfer, customer awareness and new levels of flexibility in terms of analytics and reporting.
Our customers have consistently benefited from their association with each other. Bringing them together at conferences, webinars, user events and think tanks has been one of our greatest values. With Beacon, we now have the ability to integrate performance metrics across industries and use that information to build best practices. We expect our customers to use the platform to work more closely with each other – without anyone between.
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