Bank Shot: Interstate EDP Calls On Barr for Remote Printing Solution
Situation:
Automated Direct Mail Service Center, Inc. of Riviera Beach, Florida and Interstate EDP & Direct Mail Center, Inc. located in Brooklyn, NY are mailing services companies offering state-of–the-art variable data printing and mailing solutions to businesses having high volume mailing needs. Among the many prominent clients with mission-critical operations are such companies as National Golf Foundation, Philips Pace, Florida Power & Light Company, and Wackenhut.
Ocwen Federal Bank, FSB, headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida, is one of the largest companies world-wide in the sub-prime mortgage servicing industry. Ocwen recently elected to use both Automated Direct Mail and Interstate EDP's high speed cut sheet laser printing services. Each site's Remote Printing Application for Ocwen was designed with complementing, client-specific systems allowing for disaster recovery capabilities by either facility.
To enhance security, the client preferred to transmit the data as a print image rather than as a structured document, thereby avoiding the risk of formatting, production or scheduling issues that would inevitably result from setting up jobs at a remote site. As Joseph Houss, vice president at Interstate EDP, says, "Our needs mandated a print spool solution that would be "invisible" to our VPN remote print spool clients."
Solution:
Right from the start, Barr Enterprise Print Server (BEPS) was on the short list of products to consider. "This product came highly recommended by Konica," Houss remarks. Interstate EDP uses Konica printers for their high-speed laser printing jobs. In the solution, computers located at two of the bank's operational centers send print files via TCP/IP to a third Barr server located at Automated Direct Mail. To accept the file, Automated Direct Mail's server is installed with BEPS and BARR/PRINT TCP/IP, a software module of the BEPS that accepts files over TCP/IP networks. This is achieved using the Line Print Request (LPR) /Line Print Daemon (LPD) protocol, a UNIX-based print utility. To offer as much flexibility as possible, this module also supplies the Barr Server with any variable in the LPR control file, including LPD queue name, job name and user name. This information can be used as criteria to route the job to any final destination. “By implementing the Barr solution over a firewall-protected virtual private network (VPN)," Houss explains, “our customer essentially has made our laser printers part of their wide area network, allowing all of their many offices to select and print to our remote printers." Houss says “the Barr system allows these jobs to 'drop' into the Barr spooler, without the risk of bottlenecking our laser printers because of the transmission speed of the T-1 connection."
Response:
The Barr solution not only enabled Interstate EDP's large client to print to the production laser printers in Florida, it leveraged the high bandwidth of the existing TCP/IP network. Houss observes, "Barr's capabilities allowed an immediate implementation and freed up print time." Overall, Houss says, the Barr solution is "an incredible product and a fantastic value." A significant portion of that value is due to the remarkable sales and support expertise of Barr Systems professionals.
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