The Mopria Alliance’s Growing Mark in Mobile Printing

Oct 6, 2014 12:22:28 PM

By Kaitlin Shaw

The Mopria Alliance, a global, non-profit mobile printing organization, continues to expand its membership, with a number of Brother and Epson devices recently receiving certification. Founded in September of last year, the Alliance is made up of leading document imaging technology companies with the stated goal of providing simple wireless printing from smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Brother and Epson are joining the ranks of dozens of other companies, including Canon, HP, Samsung, Xerox, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, Ricoh and others.

This past July, Brother, which is now an executive member of the Mopria Alliance, launched its first Mopria-certified printers and all-in-ones: the HL-L8250CDN, HL-L8350CDW, HL-L8350CDWT, HL-L9200CDW, MFC-L8600CDW, MFC-L8850CDW and MFC-L9550CDW. These color-laser models support mobile printing solutions including Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Brother iPrint&Scan and Cortado Workplace.

In September, Epson announced its first Mopria-certified printers, the Expression Photo XP-860, Expression Premium XP-820, XP-620 and XP-520, and Epson WorkForce WF-2660, WF-2650 and WF-2630. These devices work within the Mopria Print Service and the built-in printing framework in Android smartphones (version 4.4 or later). “Epson is proud to actively support an industry-wide movement to streamline mobile printing ease-of-use and accessibility,” said Patrick Chen, product manager of mobile connectivity, Epson America, Inc.

Furthermore, the Alliance recently sponsored an extensive survey of business executives on mobile device use in the workplace, conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit. Most executives said that mobile technologies were enhancing productivity, with 86% believing the impact of mobile printing was a positive one. The obstacles relating to mobile technology were also made clear, with security concerns chief among them: 47% of those surveyed cited the need to maintain security across multiple devices as the key challenge in introducing mobile technologies to their company.

Significant regional variation was noted as well; executives from Africa and the Middle East assigned a higher relative importance to mobile over non-mobile technologies than those in the U.S. and Europe did. This, according to researchers, suggests a “leapfrogging” effect—countries without existing infrastructures are in a position to skip over stages that other countries can’t avoid when transitioning to newer technologies. And while 61% of executives believed that mobile screen-only information would increase in the coming years, 75% said that paper is still very or somewhat important to their employees’ job performance.