PRINTITRESELLER.UK 37 What we need to avoid is that last minute rush of this is coming, what do we do? It’s a really good opportunity for resellers to talk to end-users, understand what their plan and their strategy is for the next couple of years and see how they can provide value, with or without PaperCut, and how they can position themselves as thought leaders within the industry before people end up in a bind. There is a great opportunity for resellers now to talk about different things. The market and volumes are declining; units are declining as well, but there’s still plenty of value. If we look at education or healthcare, they still need to print. And when you look at advising customers on WPP and IPP and what that means, a reseller can add more value around helping with drivers and queue deployment so they don’t have to worry about group policy and log on scripts and third-party products, etc. And if people are moving to digitisation, how can you help them from a capture perspective as well? So, there’s a lot of opportunity to continue to provide value. the other platforms and other vendor operating systems. MR: Presumably, that plays to your strengths in non-Windows environments? SB: We’ve always positioned ourselves as a vendor-neutral organisation. We’ve always talked about how we support any embedded platform, any server operating system, any client operating system, any form of print generating device, whether it be a workstation, a laptop, or a mobile phone, and that very much continues to be our path as far as PaperCut Hive goes. Maybe you’ve got a modern print device that supports WPP, but you’ve also got legacy devices that don’t support WPP, we can help you bridge that gap between them. And certainly, that’s the conversation we’re having with the OEMs. If you’ve got that mix of Windows devices and MacBooks and Chromebooks, we can help you manage that. MR: Potentially, there’s opportunity for resellers to get stickier with their customers and help solve that pain point? SB: I think it’s the biggest change the industry will see, probably since PrintNightmare. So, it’s an opportunity for resellers to reposition themselves and talk to their end-users and say, this is coming, let’s be ahead of it. be around WPP. I think the impact of PrintNightmare made Microsoft realise they need to do something, and the outcome of that is Microsoft saying we’re going to remove the third-party print drivers and we’re going to control the whole print stack. For us as an industry, there are multiple threats on different levels. There’s the end-user impact, I know of one-end user that was quite intrigued by it, turned on Windows Protected Print, and it deleted and removed every single print driver and queue they’d got and when they turned it off, it didn’t come back. So, there’s a need to educate users what WPP is, what it isn’t, what it does and what it doesn’t do. And whenever we’re talking to resellers at the moment, it’s about making sure that they’re aware of what it means and how it impacts them. And, even if print drivers go away, there is still a need for print queues and for print enablement vendors to provide some value and some service to it. I think the other aspect to be careful of is WPP is great in a Windows environment, but how does it work if you’ve also got MacBooks or Chromebooks or Linux? If you’re in a multi- operating system estate, you need to understand that actually, WPP isn’t a single solution that will fix everything for you. You still need to provide that print solution for some of Q&A To watch the full interview, please scan the QR code
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