From friction to flow: rethinking IT's least favourite problem, with Mark Asbridge, MyQ

[Music] Hello and welcome to In the Spotlight with QuoCirca, the Definitive Podcast on Digital Disruption in the Print Industry. I'm Luela Fernandes, CEO of QuoCirca, and today I'm joined by Mark Asbridge from MyQ. We're really excited to be celebrating five years of the podcast, and we've got some great guests lined up for this series. Today we'll discuss how MyQ is addressing and overcoming the challenges of our print driver deployment, and hearing more about MyQ printer provisioning profiles. So Mark, great to have you here today. Welcome to the show. Really, thanks for having me, and I think I need to say happy five-year anniversary for all your video recordings. So could you tell us a bit about your career history briefly and tell us a bit about your role at MyQ? Yeah, good. So I'm head of products and enablement at MyQ. I've been at MyQ now for just over a year, but I've worked within the print industry for over 15 years, working starting off at 0x as an OEM, before working for a very large independent reseller in the UK. My role now at MyQ, a part of the product enablement, is all around how we can support our sales teams, our training centres, our marketing teams, and obviously bringing all that information back into the product for the development of the product. So MyQ has established really great reputation around print management solutions and platforms, and before we get into the printed provisioning profiles at Youth Launch, could you tell us what led to the launch of that 3P, which I think is what you call it? And perhaps what are some of the common pain points customers are still seeing when it comes to print management and document workflows? Yeah, absolutely. So it was something that was a lot led by our partner channel, because we launched print provisioning on 10.2, and it was very much a phase one of our release. And then we started to researching and talking to our partners and understanding what their common pain points were, and that's kind of what led into development. So the real pain points was having this dynamic print enablement environment. It was all around having the right print cues at the right location, because we started talking about security, and obviously in the ideal world, everybody's running a full, following print secure environment, but we know that that's not the world that we live in. There is always that one printer or two printers, whether or not it's in a warehouse, whether or not it's on a CEO's desk, wherever it is, the rep print is still required. And people were telling us that this is becoming more and more of a pain to manage. Everybody's moving towards more of a cloud environment with, with Enter joined base devices, and deploying print cues via in-tune is quite problematic. It is achievable, but it's quite time consuming. So yes, there's other services like Microsoft Universal Print, but people still want to be able to control the deployment of direct cues, follow me cue, pull cues, all the options people are after achieving. And from that sort of research, we kind of took that back, and spent a lot of time with our developers, and really working out a way that we can save an awful lot of time for our partners, but meeting the modern security requirements. But also at the same time taking my cue's philosophy of making everything as simple and as easy and as efficient as possible. So it's all about being a user-centric product, but we also need to understand that my cue is focusing very much on our partners and the IT teams that are building and configuring the system. And we took that into place when we started developing it to make sure we had the features there for those partners to implement the product efficiently. Yes, it's always a real balance, isn't it, between user experience and IT management admin kind of tasks. And we definitely have seen in our research that some of the key challenges around print management are print driver deployment, IT administrative burden, and so on. So it sounds like you're addressing a lot of those challenges. And actually another one, is managing a legacy print fleet with different drivers and different vendors and different devices and so on. So could you tell us a bit more about our printer provisioning profiles and expand on what the capabilities are and how that does help reduce IT costs and improve user productivity as well? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not going to go too technical into the nitty gritty of how the system works, and even so our webinars and our training modules for the full details. But the whole philosophy of of printer provisioning profiles, as I let's call it 3p because I've said it way too many times, is the fact that it's all about capturing drivers once. And so the whole philosophy is rather than having to install multiple print queues, capture them one by one, you're just capturing functionality. Whether or not it's a HP, KSERA, RECO driver with finishing options, black and white, double-sided color, whatever the options are that you use because a lot of the time people use the same set of settings every time because they are a single OEM or they are doing the same driver sets time time again. So it's all about capturing the right drivers at the right time, uploading them into the system. And then basically what we're doing through our thing called a profile is you can then create a printer package linking those driver sets. And what that means is you can say to all users within the company, you can say a particular department or a particular user, only if they're in a particular location. So you can say if John Smith for example is at site office A, he will then get the HQ print queue. So it's all about being dynamic print queues associated. But from an IT point, it's all about how we can make that really quick and really efficient. So the idea is that they upload the driver, they create a profile, they then create a queue name, they associate the queue port within my queue, and then they add the driver sets. It's three boxes, click, click, click, done. But I always like to explain it, that's the manual process of creating that as a, an upload, you're then creating the profile and everything. Whereas we also know that people have large deployment that they need to be doing. And in those large deployment, they want to pre-configure a template file. So at their CSV file, and it x from Excel, they want to kind of have all of those parameters outlined so that they can just import it. So again, part of the feedback from our partners was they're not always in the environment. They're not always on a client's PC to capturing drivers and doing the build out in that kind of scenario is quite problematic. So they wanted it to be only server led. So that's kind of why we had this import export routines. So you can export your driver sets, you can export all the profiles, you can create the profiles in Excel and import that directly into the system. It's all about this massive time saving. So it's, my favorite line is the right print queue to the right person at the right location. But that's great. But we want to make it simple for IT. We want to make it simple for our partners. So it's one of those ones which when we actually started reviewing the product and seeing it work at the end, I kind of, it was the way I wanted you to underwhelming because it just works. It's just simple. And you kind of look at it and go, why didn't we do that before? And this is where I was really pleased to launch this to the market because there's so much benefit to what it's going to be doing. Yeah, and what can you say, IT doesn't want any more complexity around prints. Usually it's a case of print is already taking up enough of their time. So that sounds really encouraging. And you mentioned, I just wanted to pick up because you mentioned on document confidentiality and also identity management when you sort of talked about IntraID and how identity is changing. Did you want to talk a bit about that in terms of my queue's platform in general? Because we are seeing this move as you say to a more cloud-centric approach to print management, but that also brings with it concerns around security and how users are authenticated and so on. So how is my queue addressing those areas? Yeah, I completely agree that the world is changing when we're talking about security and and and and, and, and things because people are moving away from the legacy active directory domains. And when we start talking about print, print really is still designed to work with what we call the sound account name, the the legacy active directory name. And that's become quite a problem in world when people move to Intra only based devices or whether or not you look at void based devices. Because then you end up with these generic count names or a UPN name and that to then associate into a print management system is quite complicated. Then that's the beauty of my queue. So my queue's desktop client tool. It handles all of that basis for you. So the same application that we're utilizing to do the the printer provisioning profile deployment R3P. That also handles the authentication process. So that has single sign on with Intra or it can do active directory single sign on if necessary. But the idea is it's one tool for us that handles all the authentication processes, which would then handle all of the print queue deployments at the same time. It also supports functionalities like failover printing and client spalling or device spalling. It's it's one tool for us that is installed that manages the whole entire environment. So it's fantastic for that basis. But we also talk about security on direct printing. And I think this is something that a lot of the market kind of oversees, especially when you have a multiple site configuration where everything is joined together. My example always to this is like a CEO that moved between office locations and he has his own printer in his office or in an open office. And what happens is when they travel between sites, sometimes they forget that they're no longer at that office where their printer is and they click print. And obviously, generally speaking, being a CEO, they've got confidential data that they need to be printing. And the whole philosophy in the idea behind 3P is designed into automatically remove that printer. So not only are we handling that authentication process through one desktop client tool, we're also deploying the right prints to the right location for the right person. So it's kind of an end to end process. Yes, it's something that we're seeing in our research is that organizations are still using basic or windows authentication for their print environments. And like you say, there's a lot of security risks around that, particularly if it's just password protected rather than sort of more sophisticated identity management. So to certainly something we're watching, something I wanted to ask you actually is around, you know, we see a very strong different show to my queue is that it's always had a very strong robust cloud print and scam platform. And certainly we're seeing as print volumes decline, scam volumes are actually increasing as organizations are accelerating their digitization initiatives. I was just curious, just a couple of questions on that. Firstly, are you seeing that customers are understanding the benefit of cloud prints as a way to eliminate print servers is that kind of a trend you're seeing? And secondly, in terms of scam, are you seeing a scan usage in terms of the my key platform increasing? Yeah, absolutely. So it's an interesting question. A lot of people have asked me that one about the whole digitization and cloud migrations and everything. And clearly cloud cloud is very prominent in the market. The only thing I would always kind of argue but kind of say back is quite interesting when you start talking to different regions, different parts of the world. I mean, I've spent quite a lot of time in the APEC region and their sort of cloud migration is quite a lot behind Europe. So for us, yes, if we start talking about Europe, moving to the cloud is really quite key. But again, even when you start talking in Europe, you need to understand the business and what their goals are. If you're talking small SM, SME, then yes, they are removing all of their service. They are very much going cloud first. But if you're going to start talking to enterprise or to government or high security environments, they're still not completely into the trust of cloud. Yes, that adoption is coming, but it's coming quite slowly. So it's always one of those ones. The answer is yes, we are moving to the cloud, but it depends. And that's kind of why I always like to have those conversations with customers and partners to sort of say, what is your goal? What is your objectives? And then understanding that what product will then fit into that particular market? And we are investing a lot into our cloud environments to make sure that we're meeting that next level environment. So then also come to a point where you're saying people are reducing their fleet and reducing their print. I think from a software provider of print management, we're actually seeing an increase in adoption because people are removing their fleet of devices and reducing the fleet. But then they're going into a shared standard open plan office, then they then need security. So where they would have had maybe 10 or 15 devices in an office between 100 people, now they might only have one or two devices, but they're still the same number of people printing, they need to adopt that secure environment to make sure that they're managing their print. When we start talking about scanning and digitization, well, when you start talking about a print management system, especially this got a very strong scanning capabilities, that actually enables the devices to be a lot more intelligent and a lot more powerful for what they can do because the fact that Mike uses the one that's controlling it, we're not reliant on the devices software, the devices security levels, the devices connectivity, what apps it supports. Mike, who takes over and does that all for you. So we're seeing more requests from people wanting additional scanning processes. We've really enhanced our one drive and share point scanning processes, so we can make them really customizable based on the feedback that we're getting from our partners. I totally agree. I think it's interesting you mentioned we're seeing also more pages, but on less than devices, so there's still that need to manage that from a fleet management perspective as well as security perspective. In terms of print service, we're actually seeing a bit of an increase in print server adoption because for the reasons you mentioned in terms of security concerns, status of and to concerns, particularly for large enterprises. We always think that it's very much a hybrid approach. Maybe this is a good opportunity actually to talk about Mike's portfolio because Mike obviously has Mike X, Mike Roger, and maybe you could explain a bit about that and then tell us what's coming next for Mike. Yeah, as you're right, we have both our Mike X and our Mike Roger platform. So our Mike X has been in the industry for many, many years, installed on hundreds of thousands of devices with self-flag ship product that we talk about. Then we're going to have our Mike Roger, which is our cloud first application. We support all of the modern printing office environments where we have all of our secure printing and scanning and digitisation. As you kind of alluded, what's next? That is our myq next application, which we announce to the industry in September. This is very much looking at what we've learned on both products. When we start looking at Mike Roger, we've learned about the scalability, the actual architectural design in the background of how we can make a multi-tenant solution. But we then look at our myq X functionalities of all of that personalisation, customisation to what we can do. We look at all of the rules and routines and policies and really all the hard, enhanced things that we require part of the product. The idea is utilizing our myq X functionalities, but building that on an architecture designed by myq Roger. We're really joining the two architectural designs of the application into one. It's still a bit too early to talk about some of the real core functionalities, but seeing how the team is designing it, taking the feedback that we're supplying from the industry and making sure that this is a product that can scale massively. It will be available in multiple scenarios as well. I think that's the real key takeaway here is, if you've got an on-premise private server or a private cloud or you want a multi-tenanted public cloud solution, myq X will be that product for you. It will be able to support all of the features that people are expecting to see from a cloud pre-management, but now. I'm really excited to be talking more detail about later in the year where we can actually start actually showing it and explaining more functionalities and exactly how it works, and especially the architectural design coming from an IT background. That sounds very exciting because certainly we've seen a lack of feature parity between the cloud first type of print management solutions and the on-prem versions for different reasons because they've been architected differently and sometimes they're not built as cloud native solutions. I think what myq is doing with myq next sounds really encouraging in terms of bringing the best of both worlds together. We'll definitely be looking out for more information on that as and when you announce that. Before we finish the conversation, I really appreciate you providing that insight into print provisioning profiles or 3P. Any thoughts on also what's next for the print industry? There's been a lot of changes and consolidation in the market and like you say, there's been the shift to cloud. Is there anything in particular about you think 2026 holds for the industry? No, I think 2026 there's going to be a shift within the industry and I think that shift is very much coming from Windows protected prints. I've seen many other interviews recently with some of my competitors and we're talking about Windows protected print and honestly Microsoft want to break everything related to print. There's the only way I can describe it. But equally I understand why when we start talking about security and how print drivers interact with the driver stack within Microsoft, I completely understand it from security and compliance point of view. It's really shaking in the industry and it's making a lot of people look up and go, "Oh, we've got to change everything here related to print." And that all comes around the printer support apps because they're removing all those drivers. They're going down a native IPPS driver and then you have a printer support app which will then become your driver pane, your driver window that you can apply those settings. But it's taking time for those manufacturers to adopt that and actually develop that and actually have all the features and functionalities that customers require. So from my point of view, that's a huge change in the market and equally the question from you back to me could be, "Well, Mark, you've just told us about how we're going to be capturing drivers and deploying drivers, but you've just launched 3P, isn't that kind of directly against that functionality?" And the answer is, yes, you are correct. However, the whole design of the application is all around how that would integrate Windows protected. in the future. People are still going to need direct print cues. They're going to need pull print cues. That's not changing. What's changing is actually what the settings are on the user's environment. So the product we've just developed will have that support in the future for that functionality. So for me, yeah, the biggest change is Windows Protective Print. Everybody still loves talking about AI and as much as I love AI, when people will always say to me, what are you building into the product? And the question is, Mike, you're so simple to install and configure. Where we've got the auto-emboarding routines, he's got the automatic synchronization, the customization that it can do. You don't need AI in our products to make it work. It's just designed to be correct in the first place. But with AI, we're also looking at how we leverage that within our documentation, our partner portal, and recently we just delivered it in our partner portal. So again, the whole idea is that our partners can use very much a chatbot to question tickets, or look up information, and all those kinds of bits and pieces. So it's all about, yes, using AI, but using AI, where AI makes sense, not just because it sounds fuzzy. Yeah, I think there's a lot of trying to chew on AI into a lot of marketing at the moment. And I think in the print industry, it's very specific use case scenarios such as predictive maintenance, hardware security, which is more machine learning rather than AI. So, but I think your point about Microsoft is spot on. They've really, because they've re-engineered the whole sort of printing subsystem, it's just had a massive impact. And I think OEMs and ISVs are having to figure out how to address some of those changes. And it sounds like, Mike, who is future proofing its platform to help its customers future proof that print management has. So we'll put some further information on a 3P or into the show notes. So if anyone wants more information on printer provisioning profiles, we'll share the links. And also a webinar that you recently presented as well. But that just leaves me to thank you again for your time. It's always great speaking to you, Mark. Yeah, that's all I was just talking about. If you want more information about Mikey, you know where we are. Thank you for joining today's episode of In the Spotlight with QuoSirca. For more information, please go to QuoSirca.com and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks again for joining, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.