speaker-1: Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I'm Chanon Voice, customer marketing team here at Vasion and host of our podcast. Today we have a very cool guest, somebody who has a tremendous amount of longevity here at Vasion, and I am excited to introduce him, Michael Bennett, aka Benny. Benny, welcome to the show.

speaker-0: Show. It's great to be it's been a long time since I've been described as very cool. So think think probably years. Maybe decades, who knows?

speaker-1: Hey, I just I just call it like I see it. Now, Benny, you have been with Vasion for coming up on eight years. So you have seen a lot of the progress of of the product, of the company, and the market itself. Why don't you tell us a little bit about where you started with Vasion, what you do now, and then we'll dive into today into today's topic.

speaker-0: Great. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks again for having me. I have been here since the summer of 2018. So coming up on eight years, I started as an ADM account development manager, as we were known back then. And then when people on my team became SDRs, ⁓ sales development representatives, and now we're BDRs, business development representatives. And I have done that role for almost eight years now in various capacities, different parts of the company. I was the first ⁓ development representative working when Vasion got unleashed on the public for the first time. And now the last few years, ⁓ I did some work with our MSPs and most recently I've spent about two years in the SLED area, which is state and local government and education, which I love, probably my favorite area, and been doing that as a business development representative.

speaker-1: Excellent. So one of the things that ⁓ I'm excited to talk to you about today is because of your position, you are at the very beginning of somebody's journey in in interacting with Vasion and and our products. And today we are going to be talking about how that gateway, that first step that gets taken in eliminating print servers, right? This this is something that we have been telling people for a long time. And and I know that ⁓ the the people that you've talked to, you know, because we were talking a little bit before before we began, whether it's ⁓ in your role on the phone, you know, in person at ⁓ trade shows, but today we really want to I really want to dive into what does it mean to eliminate print servers and the reaction to that as somebody finds that for the first time. And then towards the end, obviously we'll get into the ramifications and how that can affect an entire organization. on on their journey through digital transformation of of their entire process. So I want to start there. Tell me a little bit about what it's like to tell a prospect we can eliminate your print servers.

speaker-0: It really, it's an interesting conversation to have with people. As a business development representative, we those who do that, we are the tip of the spear, as we like to say. Everybody who's familiar with anything having to do with sales, when you say, ⁓ well, I'm a closer, that person's a closer, they know what a closer is. On our team, we're openers. We have those initial conversation. I I like I coined that phrase. We're openers. Very clever. And it's great to have that initial conversation. You touched on it. There are lots of different ways that we do that. Sometimes it's over the phone. Sometimes it's over email. Sometimes it's people who are reaching out to us over the internet. Sometimes it's us looking for them and doing cold outreach. And but one of my favorites is when we're at trade shows. That's part of what we do as BDRs, we attend trade shows. I love that about our company. Our company was the success, the foundation of printer logic at the time, evasion now, came. From being built out from trade shows and having success. That's how the message was originally put out there. So I love doing that and I love being face to face with our with people, right? Hopefully lots of them will be customers at some point, you know, our prospects. It is great when you're working at a trade show at a big place in Las Vegas or Orlando, wherever it is, and you're standing there in the booth and behind you on the booth, the signage reads, Eliminate print servers, ask me how. I don't think it says ask me how, but it's, you Eliminate print servers and people walk up and there's just this: they're intrigued. They would love to eliminate their print servers because, in point of fact, they hate them. And can you really eliminate my print servers? That's the good. Can you really? It's always a variation of that. Can you really get rid of my print servers? And we love being able to say, yes, we really can do that. We start by asking them questions. How are you managing your print right now? How are you managing your servers? And invariably the c we don't, we don't want to, we hate it. I usually just try to put it off and pretend that they're not there with a baseball bat per the logo. Right. ⁓ But that's it. I mean, that is probably the most common answer, and it always makes us laugh with a baseball bat. I've heard that dozens of times live from people. They hate dealing with it, but they also feel like There's no alternative to it. Like w what else can we we have to. If you want to print documents, you have to have a print server. And it's a beautiful conversation when you get to explain to people you don't there there's a better way.

speaker-1: Right. You know, and and this is this is something that I I've seen as well is because I've I've been a product manager here at Vasion and now being on the marketing side, I've also attended a number of trade shows, been on a number of customer calls. And it is fascinating how you can see people shift from is this just a marketing gimmick to say something like, We can eliminate your print servers to, ⁓ wow, you can actually eliminate my print servers. And I think that this speaks to a a general feeling in the market today of you have a lot of push for modernization, right? People are are, I mean, they have to update to stay relevant for security concerns. but but this seems to be the thing that is the it's the caboose on the train. It's the last thing that gets the attention, gets the resources. And and so we come in and we have the opportunity to tell them, no, this is not a gimmick. Yeah. This is actually real. We can help you update your print infrastructure.

speaker-0: Absolutely. You you went right up to that point. It's the thing that people want to kick down the road. It's the can they just want to put off is dealing with print and print servers and all the things that go there. They're thinking modernization. And print is oftentimes the last thing that they think that they either want to modernize or that they're able to do anything about. So when we start to talk with them about what it looks like. It's great because you get to see how they slowly become they get pulled in and they become very intrigued about it. Now, to be clear, the discussions that I have and that the people on my team have, they're very high level. We we we speak in general terms. This is how this works. Here are some of the ideas that we have. And then fortunately, we have spectacular account executives and solutions engineers who actually then have meetings where they go in and show product demos and And give them real life examples. This is actually how they do it. And they can speak to IT people at a technical level that is incredible. They can answer all their questions and make it happen for them and give them demos and let them have POCs, you know, proofs of concept where they get to actually put their hands on it. And once they start to see that, it's transformative for these organizations, regardless, by the way, whether it's a commercial business or if it's a government entity or schools, hospitals. across all these different things, it's transformative for them I for their IT teams and their departments to see what they can actually do.

speaker-1: Coming back to this concept of there's a gateway to entry, you know, and and that's where you and your team live. And I want to talk to you a little bit about what are the pain points, what are the daily frustrations that they present to you that you're able to speak to a solution that actually works for them, even before they get to talk to the technical dec details of implementation. But what are the things that they say, here are the thorns in our side, what can you do about it?

speaker-0: There are different ways traditionally that companies have gone about organizing their print environment. There are distributive models, there are centralized models, there's the everybody has their own printer just hooked up on their desk. And so they handle it that way. There are different ways that you can go about it. All of them have their drawbacks, unfortunately. If everything is distributed and there are print servers all around and you're a medium to large size company, that's great because if there's an issue with a print server, it doesn't affect the whole organization. It just affects those people locally. But then your professionals, your IT people, either have to be on site, they either have to travel on site to fix that, which is a hassle for them, as you can imagine, or you have to have a person full time on site at that location to handle it, which is expensive, has its own drawbacks there. If you're in a centralized model where you have one print server for a for a whole organization, if there's a problem, then nobody can do anything. ⁓ And people come to us and go, Every time there's an issue with something, our whole print environment is down and nobody can do anything. And if you're talking about a law firm or a real estate company or, you know, heaven forbid, a hospital, a healthcare organization or something like that, that's devastating to them and they hate it. ⁓ so then they think, well, we'll just go to direct IP, where just everybody who needs to print will just have their own printer on their desk and we'll hook everything up like that. Can you just imagine what driver deployments look like? And You know, big things, small things, paper, toner, all that, and everybody, it is in point of fact the wild, wild west of print. And they hate that too. So when you get to a point where you can say, look, getting rid of all of the print servers, giving you centrally managed direct IP. So the benefits of direct IP, but centrally managed from one location where your IT people, your whomever is over charged with overseeing your print. Can manage it all from a single pane of glass and see it all and have visibility into it and dole out, let's say, permissions so that Nancy in accounting, who's working on her novel on the side and wants to, you know, accidentally prints up an 800-page document on color with illustrations and the whole thing, you might want to put the kibosh on that. You might want to have some control over who's not that there's anything wrong with Nancy in accounting. I'm sure she's wonderful. But You can see everything and everybody has permissions and you have visibility into what's going on. People take a step back and whoop it really to see them have that aha moment when they realize for the first time you can get rid of your print servers. And there's a better way to do it. And it's with a cloud-based SaaS model, reduces infrastructure, which is you you touched on something. I didn't want to interrupt you, but you were talking about the modernization piece. That's on that's in every boardroom. Now that's on every small, medium, large size companies, they're all about how can we reduce our infrastructure? How can we reduce the physical part of our business? How can we move to the cloud? I dare say that all of us, every one of us who has a cell phone has cloud backup. We're all storing our photos and our personal stuff on the cloud. We probably do that at home as well, in addition to our, you know, our local hard drives. ⁓ when you make it clear to people that they have an option. To modernize and move that way and print can be involved in that. There it is. It's the aha moment when they have that realization. It's great to be a part of that.

speaker-1: See, and this is something that that we have seen over many, many years of of implementing our solution is not only are we helping companies modernize, but we are supporting a a hybrid workforce model. Like you and you touched on this and I wanted to just to just point this out. By having a cloud native ⁓ printing solution without print servers, you have individuals that can that can handle things from that single pane of glass rather than needing to be on site at all times. ⁓ in in whether and when you start to have organizations that have multiple locations, this ability really starts to add up. And and I'd like to, if I may, you were telling me a story before we started shooting ⁓ of of an example of this where you had a I believe it was a school district ⁓ that that was able to eliminate print servers, update their their infrastructure and the impact that it have. Would you be willing to to tell us about that?

speaker-0: Sure. And this having worked most recently in that area with our clients in the education area, I'm very familiar with this and it's an example that we use a lot. But we have a school district, a large school district. ⁓ most things they say in Texas grow bigger. So that applies to school districts as well. And I wanna I'm ⁓ I'm not a hundred percent sure on the exact number that it was, but the year before implementing printer logic, it was in the neighborhood of two thousand. Print-related help desk tickets. That's not total help desk tickets. That's just help desk tickets that are related to something in their print environment. Can you imagine the man hours that go into that? The headaches, the dealing with it, and not just the doing that and the fixing that, but all the time that that takes those people away from dealing with other things, initiatives, proactive. things that you would like to have your tech team working on. They implemented printer logic. And I believe the next year, the number of help desk tickets for print related items was four. So I think that puts it in something like the 99.7% reduction, right? I mean, for all intents and purposes, a 100% reduction in print related help desk tickets. And while the size of that particular institution is maybe uncommon for that. The result, the out, you know, the outcome is something that we see regularly. It's common to see that help desk related issues go away. When you move things to the cloud, to the secure cloud, to a SaaS, native SaaS solution, which is what VasionPrint is. And it's great when we get to see how people respond to that and how much they appreciate it, how they're truly I mean, what's you've been here long enough, you're you know, you're over five years. What's the it just works? That's the common thing that we hear back. That's the feedback that we get from our clients. It just we should put it on a T shirt. Does anybody just do we should think about doing it? It just works. We hear that and it it happens to be true.

speaker-1: There's an interesting progression to this, right? And and I know being being step one, you're probably not involved all the way through to the end. But one of the things that that Vasion has ⁓ has built out is this ability to modernize, right? To update, to consolidate, ⁓ to to increase security and eliminating print servers may be the wow factor that gets them started on that journey, but but it's not just Print servers. ⁓ the the follow-up to that, the ripple effect is ⁓ you you reduce your tech stack, right? Licensing, hardware, backup systems. You know, you mentioned drivers and driver management. So so the hidden costs that go along with that, ⁓ not to mention if you have multiple vendors that you're working with, ⁓ management consoles, like all of this is a drain on IT resources and and so consolidating down into What we call an intelligent print automation platform, right? With elimination eliminating print servers being the beginning of that. But it's an entire modernizing ⁓ journey. And I imagine that this is something that maybe in those initial conversations, they don't see the end game yet, but it's exciting to get them started on that journey.

speaker-0: It is. And that's what, again, that's what we do as BDRs. We get, you know, what's the old adage? How much do you feed a donkey in the morning to get a full day's work out of just enough so that he knows he's hungry, right? It's the same kind of thing. How much do you give? Again, speaking from the BDR perspective, how much do you give to a potential prospect, a potential customer? It's just enough so that they know, goodness gracious. I could really do something with this if what you're telling me is true. And then again, as I mentioned, they go into meetings with account executives and solutions engineers where they lay it all out. But you bring up intelligent print automation and that's that's what it is. And the transformative part from the VASION perspective is to share with people for the first time that this thing, this print environment that has been an albatross for you. It's something that you know you hate managing. Nobody loves, they want to bash it with a baseball bat. But print can be the gateway to modernizing all of these things that you mentioned. Your text at reducing the physical part of it to modernizing everything that you do. And that's at the that's at the core. Well, that that one piece, starting with print, is the tip of it. But that whole process is that's the core of what IPA is all about. You modernize by moving to the cloud. And eliminating your your print servers. And then you consolidate by bringing everything, every document, everything. It all comes into one platform with Vasion Print and with Automate, where, you know, we want to make printing more efficient and easier, but also we want to take print out of it for things that you don't need to print. It's almost like you you wind up asking yourselves, okay, we're gonna print better. We're gonna we're gonna be more efficient with it. We're gonna have more controls over it. We're gonna have more visibility into what and how we're printing. But we're also with this IPA, we're also gonna be rethinking. Do we need to print these things? What are things that we don't need to print anymore? And you move toward document automation with that as well. And that's how print kind of serves as the gateway for that. And then, you know, the last piece is to automate, which is, you know, is that. Which is automation of those things that are repeatable that you're going to use so that you take out the manual workflows and it eliminates the manual labor part of it and it just makes everything smoother. And streamlines like your tech stack, eliminating your infrastructure. You talked about the the hidden expenses that goes on. People, you you might be tempted to say, Well, we bought our print servers, we own them. There's an upkeep factor there, right? It you may think you own your automobile. But to operate it, there's the cost of tires, gas if you're going that way, electricity if you're going the other way. But all of those things, all the maintenance that goes on, oil changes, insurance, registration, all that. So you own your car, but you're not free and clear of anything, right? It's the same way in print. You own your print servers, but they're still, and then they're gonna go bad at some point and hopefully not take down all of your information with it. But if you can just move away from that entirely. Game changing.

speaker-1: You know, in the in the last few minutes here that we have, there's there's such a valuable point here, because even though this is the beginning of the journey, right, eliminating print servers is is kind of the modernization piece of the modernize, consolidate, automate journey, right? Our our intelligent ⁓ print automation platform. But but reframing the mindset from modernization as as ⁓ a Maintenance task to modernization is a strategic initiative with massive upside. Exactly. And this is what is so interesting is you know, we have a lot of conversations with ⁓ people who are on the front line, sysadmins, IT directors, individual contributors, and we ⁓ and and all the way up the ladder to CIOs, CISOs, you know, even CEOs. And and I happen to know that ⁓

speaker-0: Proactive. Exactly. Being proactive.

speaker-1: You know, we've had our chief technology officer, Corey Urkenbrack, on the show ⁓ a couple of times and and he's talked about the phenomenal conversations that he's had with higher level leaders, but it all starts somewhere. And that's what is remarkable is when when you can step through this gateway and realize this is something that is going to have an impact for the entire organization. It might start with a sysadmin, but eventually it works its way up. And and that that platform that Vasion offers. Really does transform a company over time.

speaker-0: Absolutely. And I think it's telling that you point it out that way because I there's this over years of dealing with this and seeing how it works, there are some solutions, and we've all experienced this in places that we've worked, that if the solution comes from the top down, sometimes you have to get buy-in, right? And sometimes that buy-in, depending on what the solution is and the nature of it, can be difficult to get people as it filters down through the organization. It can be difficult to get the buy-in on it. What we love and what I really enjoy seeing with Vasion's products, particularly as we're speaking with Vasion Print eliminating print servers, is a lot of times it does start with a sysadmin. It starts with that person who got sent to a to a trade show or that person who got sent to what's it called? The interwebs to look at, hey, Google eliminate print servers. Is there can it be done? Right. And who comes up when you do that? Hopeful hopefully it's us. Let's check that. But we'll make sure that that happens. But When you do that, and then it's great to see the people on the front lines want our solution. Why do they want it? They don't care about costs, they don't care about what color it is, they don't care about how it looks. All they know is this is gonna make our life easier. This is gonna make things work the right way. And that's how you know that something has true value and that it works. If the people, the foot soldiers, the people on the front lines are gonna be using it and managing it and be affected by that solution, if they want it. That's because it works. So we start with those sysadmins. We start with those IT direct, depending on the size of the organization. Sometimes this is all the same person, right? Your sysadmin can be the C the CISO that can be the chief technology. You know, it depends if there's eight people in the whole organization. But when it's a larger team, you'd love to see it that the people right up front, they get buy-in and they get buy-in right away because they see they're the ones who have to deal with the hassles. They're the ones dealing with the the help desk tickets. The the people who can't print, the constant calls. I see it all the time when I talk to people on the phone or when I meet with them at trade shows. ⁓ yeah, I love it when I get a call from a student at 2 A.m. because they're trying to print their thesis or whatever and it just won't go. I love that. That's my favorite thing. And you know, we can make it so that that doesn't happen. And they buy in and they wind up being the driving force. They push it up. And when it goes from the bottom up, that's great because you know that it works. And that's the way it works with. Asian print.

speaker-1: Benny, it's been it's been awesome having you on the show. Such an incredible opportunity to speak to with somebody who has so many years of experience, who knows the industry, who knows. Just clear. Not just wanna make sure. Yeah, not at all. But ⁓ but I think I think if there's a I jotted down some notes, and if there's a key message here, it's you can't have a modern IT environment.

speaker-0: You're calling me old though, right? No. 'Cause I feel ya.

speaker-1: built on legacy print infrastructure. Not possible. You know, as much as you might want to ignore the the the last car in the train, it's still attached and eventually you've got to address it. And and that is what we're so excited with, you know, not only the intelligent print automation platform as a whole, but that first step, which is we can eliminate your print servers and help you modernize to be able to consolidate and then eventually automate. So That's it. Benny, it's been fantastic having you on the show today. Thank you so much.

speaker-0: Pleasure. I appreciate it. Thanks.