Senior management says the two week roll-out of the HP Universal Print Driver (UPD) across 100,000 staff had also allowed the company to “retire” 225 redundant print servers costing about US$2,900 (A$3,700) per server per month – saving the company $7.8 million a year.

The company said more than two million copied of its UPD had so far been downloaded from HP.com. The driver works with virtually all networked HP LaserJet printing devices, letting IT staff focus on more strategic issues and projects, reduce helpdesk calls and improve the productivity of those who print.

Because the driver automatically recognises upgrades to HP devices, IT staff don’t have to manually update the driver on each device on a network. For business travellers, the UPD eliminates the need to locate and download drivers for remote offices, since they are already able to print to most HP LaserJet printers, regardless of location.

“Issues related to printer drivers are daily time-sinks for IT professionals. But the (UPD) eliminates those headaches by simplifying printing and reducing IT and help desk calls,” said HP worldwide marketing vice-president for LaserJet, Vince Ferraro.

“The HP UPD allows customers to concentrate on their real business of printing valuable documents, not supporting and managing their printer fleets,” Mr Ferraro said.

HP found a couple of other advantages in its internal UPD deployment, the biggest being that by changing the default settings to duplex printing – double-sided printing – paper usage at the company was reduced by 25 percent.

HP expects to save more than $6 million and reduce annual paper usage by 750 tons when implemented globally as a standard.