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Toshiba America Business Solutions has acquired UK-based Youmebee, Ltd., the company behind the directprint.io cloud print management platform that is the basis of Toshiba’s Elevate Sky Print Management offering. Toshiba will operate the entity as a standalone business under the name Coreza and eventually rebrand the product as Coreza Print. Notably, that means the platform will still manage multi-vendor printer fleets (not just Toshiba devices) and will continue routes to market that include other OEMs as well as direct and channel sales (e.g., office equipment dealers, value-added resellers, managed service providers, and IT distributors).
The acquisition aligns with Toshiba’s evolving managed print as a service (MPaaS) strategy, which recognizes the realities of multi-vendor environments across enterprise and small-to-medium-size businesses. The directprint.io platform supports this landscape by offering:
- True vendor-agnostic support across all major print brands
- Cloud-native architecture that eliminates print servers and reduces IT complexity
- Seamless integration with identity providers, productivity suites, and security frameworks
- Real-time analytics for usage, cost, and sustainability insights
Youmebee Delivered Protected Print Before Microsoft Envisioned WPP
The platform also has a strong story to tell when it comes to Microsoft’s Windows Protected Print (WPP) infrastructure that is being rolled out over the coming months and years. Coreza President David Jenkins noted in a briefing that, when the platform was architected more than 7 years ago, the developers opted to deploy their own cloud-first print stack rather than rely on the traditional Windows infrastructure. That decision now seems prescient as Microsoft abandons the Windows print stack in favor or a Zero Trust-friendly Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) standard. Jenkins noted that the Coreza Print platform will enable customers to seamlessly migrate to WPP without worrying about support for their legacy devices.
In addition to being WPP-friendly, the platform boasts other strengths that should be attractive to IT departments. For starters, it allows customers to eliminate on-prem print servers and reduce admin overhead. Its “zero-touch provisioning” means that new users and devices don’t require additional configuration. Also, print jobs stay on the customer network—addressing data residency and latency concerns. And, as noted, the platform remains device-agnostic and will continue supporting devices from most major OEMs.
Keypoint Intelligence Opinion
Toshiba’s purchase of Youmebee is less about locking-in a technology partner and more about expanding the company’s presence in the growing cloud print services space. Keeping the newly christened Coreza as a standalone business serving multiple OEMs—as Ricoh has successfully done with its DocuWare subsidiary—could help the platform increase its reach. (That said, some rival OEMs balked when Ricoh purchased scanner maker Fujitsu and opted to drop the Fujitsu line. History is a fickle teacher.)
Either way, as Microsoft rolls out its Windows print modernization (which happens every 30 years or so), Toshiba and Coreza seem to be in the right place with the right product. This is especially true as the realities of the significant changes WPP necessitates come into focus for IT departments and the print partners that serve them.
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