01732 759725 36 are quite happy with a direct IP printing solution. For a micro business, for example, secure print isn’t as important, but they’ve moved to the cloud, their user identity is in the cloud, they just need people to walk into an office and print without needing to call a support desk or have admin rights to download drivers or whatever. So that notion of print enablement we’ve seen really pick up. In fact, we’re seeing customers spend more on print enablement than maybe they’ve historically spent on secure print. One use case is a UK school who have used it to push out the print queues for the printers they’ve got in all their different classrooms. They don’t need any secure print function but just want to make sure that if a student needs to print or a teacher needs to print, they print at the point of time, and it just magically happens. We’ve got larger enterprise organisations that maybe have a few hundred sites around the country, with one or two devices in small practices who don’t need secure print, there’s only five or six staff in the office. But they move between offices and need to make sure that when they need to print, they can. I think there’s been a move back to making printing easy without necessarily needing the full secure print aspect of things. MR: How do you see Universal Print and WPP impacting the print market? SB: I think there’s still an element of watch this space. Obviously, Universal Print has been out for a few years now, but the major impact is going to more mature from a US perspective. But, with the emergence of Microsoft bringing a Universal Print, then we’ve got Windows Protected Print, and the potential move to what is going to be the end of a third-party print driver in a couple of years, it’s certainly started to raise questions. We’re having a lot more conversations with OEMs and resellers about understanding the implication of that at multiple levels. It’s about understanding the impact of the new Windows PSAs, which are effectively what will replace drivers. It’s about understanding IPP and IPP Infra, and how OEMs are implementing that at a device level to make sure that legacy devices can be supported in a WPP environment as well. So, from a PaperCut MF perspective, we are working closely with the OEMs at a Japanese level and a development level to make sure that we can help legacy customers who’ve got those devices that maybe won’t support WPP at a hardware level, that we can support them from a PaperCut level, and therefore support the OEM and not necessarily have to force customers globally to be ripping out legacy devices that maybe they don’t need to or don’t want to. There’s also that element of even when print drivers go away, there will still be a need for print queues in the world, it’s just that they’re going to be a slightly different, maybe IPP- based, for example, or PSA-based. So, with PaperCut Hive, we’re starting to see a lot more interest from customers who simple, straightforward sale, drop it over the top of an existing infrastructure, and all works well. You get into a cloud space, and the majority of the time it’s actually an infrastructure removal project, and we are a by-product of it. It’s a customer saying I need to remove my print service, I want to get rid of my on-prem Active Directory and move into Azure or Google Workspace. And, that’s not just about dropping in print management, it’s about understanding the IT infrastructure in place. I think some of the challenges that we’ve seen in the industry are maybe a lack of understanding at times, of actually how that infrastructure will impact print. You need to understand how networks are segmented, how does network flow, what ports are open if you’ve got a multi-site environment, for example. So, there’s a lot more of an infrastructure concept of it. I spoke to the head of pre-sales at a UK manufacturer, they sell PaperCut Hive and other solutions, and they said whenever they sell cloud, they address it as more of an IT conversation and an infrastructure sale, rather than here’s 35 devices and here’s some print management software to help you manage it. It is now a conversation where people need to understand network infrastructure a lot more to have a successful transition and implementation. MR: So, is it more of a professional services piece from a reseller’s perspective, and does it require them to upskill in some way? SB: It’s a slightly more consultative sell. You could sell PaperCut MF and within reason, you could pretty much drop it into anywhere and it would work. Now you need to understand the customer’s IT policies, is it a zero trust environment, and what is their definition of zero trust? User identity is it done in the cloud, or is it done on-prem, how does traffic flow across a network within the organisation? So, I think you do have to be a little bit savvier when you’re understanding the best product for the best fit, for example. MR: One of the biggest pain points around print management is managing queues and drivers. Hive in particular, does simplify that for IT teams, doesn’t it? SB: Yes definitely. It’s a relatively recent trend in the EMEA market, it’s probably Q&A …continued
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