01732 759725 34 MR: From a reseller’s perspective, what are the challenges around selling cloud vs. on-prem, particularly around infrastructure readiness? SB: I think there’s probably two aspects that we’ve seen. One of them is maybe a bit more unique to PaperCut. The second is certainly a wider industry challenge. From a PaperCut perspective, when a lot of customers want cloud, people go, here’s a cloud solution. What we’ve seen some challenge with is customers saying they want PaperCut MF and are expecting to put that into a cloud environment. PaperCut Hive and PaperCut MF are two different products. One is 20-25 years in development, the other is five or six. There are people who want to simply lift PaperCut MF and want Hive to do exactly the same thing, and we stress that they’re two different products, they’ve also got two different feature-sets. So that’s one challenge, we’ve had to work with resellers and customers to help them understand not every PaperCut MF customer is necessarily a transition to PaperCut Hive. Secondly, and this is probably what everyone in the market is seeing, it’s a very different sale. Print management in an on-prem world was a relatively MR: Is PaperCut Hive helping you tap into new markets or customer segments that weren’t as accessible with your traditional on-premise offerings? SB: Absolutely without a doubt. There’s two. Generally, people associate PaperCut with the education sector and we’ve been very strong there. However, what we’ve seen with PaperCut Hive is an emergence of the lower‑end, K6-K12 education space, schools that typically don’t have any kind of onprem infrastructure or outsource it to a third‑party. So actually, our biggest vertical for PaperCut Hive is the K6K12 space. We’ve seen a real drive in independent schools, academy trusts, foundation trusts, etc. So certainly, it’s opened up an education space that maybe we weren’t as prevalent in before. And then the other one, I use a term micro SMB, which is one to three or four device customers. People that typically don’t have an IT function, with 30, 40, 50, maybe 100 users and no on-premise servers. So again, print management on-prem wasn’t really an option for them. So, K6-K12 and micro SMB are two markets that we were prevalent in before, but which seem to have adopted cloud faster. Michelle Ryder (MR): PaperCut has evolved from a traditional on-premise print management solution into a cloud-first platform that enables secure printing for today’s hybrid workforce. In your opinion is cloud-first adoption now mainstream? Stu Brookes (SB): Yes, I think so. It’s taken time, and there are certain verticals that aren’t yet ready. But I think cloud only, or cloud-first, is where the majority of businesses are looking to move to. If they’ve not already moved, they certainly have plans to go in that direction. With the launch of PaperCut Hive, we’re certainly seeing an increase in the number of customers making that journey to the cloud space. Stu Brookes, EMEA Regional Lead & Head of Sales and Channel at PaperCut, speaks to Michelle Ryder about the company’s evolution from on-premise print management to a cloud-first platform built for today’s hybrid workforce. He discusses the challenges resellers face when selling cloud versus on-prem, explains how PaperCut Hive simplifies IT pain points and shares his perspective on the impact of Universal Print and WPP on the wider print market. Here’s an excerpt of the conversation Q&A with Stu Brookes Q&A continued... Stu Brookes
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