speaker-0: Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I am Shannon Voice, your host today, and I am very excited to be joined by two very knowledgeable human beings. ⁓ we'll we're gonna let them introduce themselves. Brent, why don't we start with you?

speaker-2: Yes, hello, my name is Brent Summers. I am a solutions engineer on our federal team. So I work with all of our federal customers, removing those roadblocks and taking away any technology technology issues they have and making sure they love the product.

speaker-0: Excellent.

speaker-1: Perfect. Yeah. And I'm Bryce Hubbard. I am our federal civilian account executive. So I basically spearhead our go to market ⁓ from a field sales perspective for all of our civilian government agencies.

speaker-0: Excellent. And and that is what we're going to be talking about today. It it's a very interesting and very ⁓ fascinating journey that Vasion has been on to become FedRamp High Authorized. And ⁓ we won't we won't go into the the details of what that takes. ⁓ for those who are familiar, you certainly know. But I do wanna talk about and Bryce, we'll start with you, why was it so important? to Vasion and and to this federal team that we achieve that Fed ramp high authorization.

speaker-1: Yeah, for sure. I think ⁓ for me it it goes back to really the company mission of Vasion, which is making digital transformation attainable to everyone. And for me, that means we owe our government customers that same intentionality ⁓ for meeting them where they're at in their digital transformation journey as we have with all of our private sector customers. You know, going back ten, eleven years now. those private sector customers were ready to make the leap towards SaaS solutions, really leverage the cloud and, you know, eliminate some of that data center footprint. And printer logic was there to bridge that gap. And so that's kind of where we see a lot of our federal agencies are today, is they're ready to take that step that some private sector customers maybe were ready to do 10 years ago. And now we have that Fed ramp authorized solution that checks that one big box for them to be able to make that move. So being able to to bridge that gap for them is super important.

speaker-0: Let me ask you a a quick follow-up question. I know that there are different levels, right? You have FedRAMP low, FedRAMP medium, and FedRAM high. How common is it that our customers, customers who are working in this realm of print infrastructure and print environment, how often would you say they come looking for something that is only high? Or or is are some of the other levels acceptable to these agencies?

speaker-1: How Yeah, for sure. I think on a a need by need basis, ⁓ looking at solutions that meet the control criteria for the FedRamp low or moderate and then getting into high always comes back to a specific use case. So agencies more likely than not will say high is probably gonna be the bar that we want to set if we can. So being one of the very few that exist on that FedRamp marketplace To be able to say, yes, we are FedRAMP high. We meet every single one of these controls. This is the package that proves that. And this is the provisional authority, I guess we'll say, that proves that we are ready to take on that level. And that's not something that you run into every day. We have people tell us from a government side perspective, from a contractor side perspective, since we work with so many contractors on a face to face basis. We have channel partners tell us that. Wow, you just do not see this ever. This is amazing and this is going to be something that is super valuable for your government customers and and we don't take that lightly at all. That's it's something to celebrate for sure.

speaker-0: It is it is absolutely something unique. I I've been at Vasion long enough to remember when they started the process. I was actually on the product team at the time and there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into it and and those agencies that require that definitely understand what goes into it. And so it is exciting that Vasion is now high authorized and we have the ability to to service those those customers. Brent, I want to come to you a little bit here and I want to talk about the problem. What What is it that we are solving for, right? ⁓ and and obviously we can we can really dive into this and and we'll we'll take comments from both of you, but let me start with a statement and you can tell me what you think of this. Government agencies at every level are trapped between the urgency to modernize and the weight of legacy infrastructure holding them back.

speaker-2: That's an accurate statement for sure. And if I if you don't mind touching on the first question, right, ⁓ as as little as three years ago, or maybe as much as three years ago, depending on the the time and technology, right, we had the largest agency in the country reach out and say we need a FedRAMP high solution. So it just tells you that they've been looking for it. And I would also say if you're talking about Department of War or Department of Defense customers, right, they will not let you run on their network unless it's the highest security. So they need something that's FedRamp High. So ⁓ it's kind of sums up that question. But yeah, you're exactly right, right? If you think about the innovation of IT, right, since the early nineties, everything has been disruptful and and innovated from virtualization to SaaS to all kinds of products. And print is really what the one that's that's lagging behind, right? It's the legacy product. We've been printing the same way since 1996, and that's still today is the way a lot of government systems run. They want to get to that next level of innovation, right? But legacy is holding them back. So that's that's what we're here to solve for them. And the solve that we've gif given them just eases that pain and brings them into modern managed print.

speaker-0: You know, it's it's interesting because in the very first episode that we did ⁓ of the podcast this year, we we had the the analogy that was that was used is imagine if you go over to your friend's house and they ask you if you want to watch a movie and they break out of V CR. You know, I I haven't used a V CR in in over twenty years, right? But it does feel a little bit like for some of these for some of these organizations, that's the infrastructure that they're dealing with. Is they they are they are old and they're outdated and they're very costly. And so this problem is very real. And especially when you add to that the need to have a high authorization, I imagine a lot of these organizations find themselves feeling stuck. Would you would you agree?

speaker-2: Absolutely. And you know, a real story about that is we ⁓ the the legacy architecture which is built around print servers, right? When you talk about printing, which Vasion Print solves, we had a customer that had 400 print servers. So think about managing four hundred print servers, not only managing that, but the cost of that. You mentioned that, right? That is a burden for IT today. And we were able to eliminate all four hundred of those. So we're saving that agency. something like one point six million dollars a year just from removing print servers, right? So that simple act of innovating, having a SaaS solution that we just basically give the government the easy button by going FedRamp High, right? We take away all those security concerns. They don't have to go to their CISO and ask whether this is going to work because by nature it's FedRamp high. So that checks all the boxes. So it makes it easy for them to come to, you know, innovate to the modern age of printing.

speaker-0: You know, and ⁓ Bryce, I'll I wanna give you a chance to to add on to that, but it I like what you said about the easy button because my understanding of of the the FedRAMP marketplace is you are either there as a vendor or you are not, right? And so if they need a solution, that's where they have to go to look for it. And and if ⁓ if if you're not there, then you're not in consideration, right?

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. ⁓ and I I think it all kind of goes back to that customer mentality of like I'm staring down the barrel of these four hundred print servers, this huge architectural web that has been built and has been in place for l longer than I've been alive. And, you know, that perspective, the security perspective, the perspective of budgets that are being cut and people that are being moved and manpower that's available, it's like, where do I even start? From that perspective. So putting myself in their shoes, it's like, you're right, it's it's incredibly daunting. So I think that really is the root of what a FedRamp high ATO means for a customer. It checks those boxes. We know that we can make this implementation as smooth and as quick as you need it to be because you have more important things that you need to be doing with the limited time and resources that you have than upkeeping your print infrastructure. So being able to provide what Brent said, that easy button from all of these touch points and all of these things that are blocking that progress for these agencies, that's the that's the ticket really. That's what it means for them.

speaker-0: You know, I I'm curious. I'd like to ask ⁓ one or both of you if if you've had an experience of what is it like when somebody does reach our doorstep and you tell them for the first time, we can eliminate your print servers. Do do you do you have I I mean I I'm I'm just curious in the federal space, are people do they just say, Okay, let's do it? Or is it is there some hesitancy going, can you really do that?

speaker-1: Yeah, we get a lot of okay, yeah, right. Sure. And then Brent, ⁓ I I know that you're doing a lot of these ⁓ technical demonstrations and there's every single demo that I've been on, you know, Brent and I together, there's always a light bulb moment ⁓ where you see the customer get it, whether it's, you know, showing them different pieces of the the architecture or showing them actual features within the product. They say, ⁓ my gosh, that is going to save me so much time. I have to go through this process, this change management piece, this, you know, signature, just to be able to do all of this manual work. This is going to cut every single piece of that out of my life and I will never look back. So that's just Something that we always see.

speaker-2: I'll sit in front of customers in kind of more of a ⁓ seminar standpoint. I've had this before where there's several folks in the room and you'll see something someone in the background as we're talking about our solution, they're snickering and I've had this happen and we'll say, guys, you got a question or something, right? And and they'll just admit, you know, I'm just back here going, I'm not sure I really believe it's gonna work that easy, right? And we've also been on calls with customers where we're doing an implementation and or l a demo, I would say, and they like like Bryce said, the light bulb moment goes off and you some of the reactions we get from these folks are just like blown away. And on the flip side, we've had customers that have done a a a trial install and unfortunately they couldn't find the budget for it. And they've come back to us and said, I can't believe I'm gonna have to go back to the alternative, to the legacy. It's painful to see that, right? So we've seen all the above and ⁓ I've sold software for many, many years and it's very, very unique where you can see that light bulb moment go off in a customer's head where they really get and understand what it's gonna save them and ⁓ the pain of of not doing that really it moves for people forward for sure.

speaker-0: You know, it it is remarkable what Vasion is building out, right? Just when you when you consider the market segment where where we exist with intelligent print automation, right? And the three pillars of that where we help modernize, consolidate, and then that allows companies to then automate and and the full spectrum of that. And you know, having again worked on both the product and the marketing side, I've been able to speak with a lot of customers. And Outside of the realm of the federal space, there are a lot of individuals who say, I just I want to believe that this is true. And then they get in, they start to implement it, and it is in fact true. And and so in in the federal space now with with this high authorization, there's this underlying seriousness to it, which is The fact that we are FedRamp high authorized isn't just a feature. It really is something that is a decision making you know, like a critical piece of information to making that decision. And it sounds like you have seen this time and time again. Yeah.

speaker-2: Certainly. the the list of print manufacturers or print management solutions that have FedRamp Pi is a very, very short list. In fact, if you've got one hand, it's not going to fit on one hand. So it's a very ⁓ elite list, if you will. But again, ⁓ our focus on ⁓ our solutions, we never had a doubt that it would be government ready, right? It was built from the ground up secure by nature. It's no surprise that. A lot of software companies when they go into selling to the government, they start with the civilian space, right? Civilian agencies who are harder don't have the security requirements. We started with the DOD and got really, really successful in the DOD. You know, having that as a solution, we can go forward with customers. And I love the the moving forward with the IPA, right? Because today we talk about print as a single thing, but the reality is I'm printing from a lot of different systems today, right? I've got BDI users. Right. I've got users that are printing from different systems like potentially SAP or ⁓ electronic health records. Right. So there's a lot of disparate systems that print is coming from. And the way we can s consolidate all that to one secure platform is really, really special.

speaker-0: And that is a remarkable thing to hear because so many people, you know, maybe jokingly say print is dead. But at the end of the day, print is very much not dead, you know. And and we know that just from the internal metrics, how many pages are printed, how many times somebody clicks control print, and it's astronomical. And then you take into account it within a government agency, and and Bryce, I wanna ask you. What has been kind of the feel or the reaction to to people realizing one, they can work with us because we're FedRAMP, high authorized. And two, not only can we eliminate your print servers, but we can also open the door to an anti an entire digital transformation journey that that is, you know, intelligent print automation. What's been your experience with customers having their eyes open to that?

speaker-1: Probably the first use case that comes to mind is a ⁓ is an agency that very first saw us on that FedRamp marketplace and thought, okay, you know, a a print management solution that is FedRamp high authorized. I'd like to at least take a look. So they came in just very much from a curiosity standpoint to say, What can you guys actually do? I you know, I I saw that you have this ATO. I want to learn more. That was pretty much it. So we gave them a demo, showed them what we're able to do ⁓ from a print management perspective, an architecture elimination perspective. Brent gave them a fantastic technical overview of the solution. And it very much went from curiosity to intensity, saying, okay, we need to get this implemented as soon as possible. And really what the use case was for them was they have a lot of roaming users, ⁓ people who are going from ⁓ site to site, branch to branch, ⁓ performing different audits. That's a paperwork intensive job, right? And that's kind of the whole host of their end users is these auditors that are ⁓ performing those day-to-day duties. And us being able to tell them that we can support that end user network, support the printers that they're printing to, no matter where they're at and the the technical ability that we have to be able to uplift that effort, they Essentially said, okay, we need to take this to the next level right now. So and that's a that's going to be a fairly common conversation moving forward with the Fed ramp ATO. ⁓ I know we're fairly new in the space, obviously, only having the the the Fed ramp ATO now for a few months. But ⁓ yeah, I think that type of effort and that type of conversation is gonna be ⁓ a pretty common thing.

speaker-0: I want to come back to you in this same vein. Once somebody decides that they want to implement our solution, I imagine the question is, how big of a lift is this? ⁓ can tell us a little bit about what customers can expect as far as ease of implementation.

speaker-2: I guess one of the ⁓ legacy challenges is customers that are using print servers. But it works in their favor because if you've got print servers, we can import them. And we actually have a little tool that will do an automated import from your print servers. So we can actually automate the first automation we do probably is our import tool to import all your printers from your print server. From there it makes implementation really easy because that's all saved up in SaaS. So we have all that information now in an admin console that ⁓ an admin can go in there. And choose how they want to deploy drivers. With about six clicks, I can deploy drivers to my entire enterprise. ⁓ I can choose how to deploy printers to my users based on the network they're connected to, based on an active directory or intra-ID group they're a part of. So we make it really easy to deploy printers. We really in a in about a three-hour process over a certain number of meetings can get a customer from nothing to up and running their entire print enterprise. And it's kind of a set it and forget it. We have many customers that Come to us a year later and say, Man, I I just realized I haven't been in the console in like months because I just set it up and it works. You know, the other thing that's nice about it is as we've been as we innovate in our platform, we add options, right? So we now have an output solution, right, that does backend printing. So the users that are not clicking file print, but they're in some kind of application printing from that application, right? We have government customers that trusted us with our print product and now are trusting us with our output product. And it was just as easy because we are in a single pane of glass for that solution as well. So yeah.

speaker-0: This is the power of the Vasion platform which which many, many of our customers have been able to experience and now is available to these federal agencies. And I wanna I wanna take a step back ⁓ or maybe up from a high level executives perspective, right? A high level decision maker. Maybe they're not on the front lines, maybe they're not going to be in the console, but they are part of that decision making chain. What is it like for them? in this whole process where they might be signing off on something or need to sign off on something that they're not gonna be interacting with a lot. What does it look like as far as our process goes with interacting with with individuals like that?

speaker-1: I think it's a great point to kind of bring up the the executive, the the decision maker, the the person who's probably putting pen to paper on something like this and kind of staking what it is. They're really staking their signature on this. Like, why should I put my neck out for your solution? ⁓ because that means something totally different to like Brent talked about, a systems administrator or a help desk technician that's knocking down. help desk tickets all day about, you know, my printer isn't working. ⁓ a CIO or a CTO doesn't maybe necessarily care what that workflow looks like, but more so, like what is the business case? Like why does it make sense for me to sign off your on your solution? Why does it make sense for me to spend part of my very limited resources on a solution like this? And that's where it gets into, you know, the business case is very obvious and it always has been for printer logic and and Vasion as a whole, being able to perform those consolidation efforts, the infrastructure elimination, the time spent, the the soft ROI is there as much as the hard ROI is. We're saving agencies, you know, sometimes, you know, over ⁓ a million dollars as the example that that Brent gave. ⁓ And that's not just us saying that it's worth it because it's worth it. It's not just saving you time, it's saving you money in the business case is and always has been there. So ⁓ that's kind of more so what matters from a decision making perspective is that business case. ⁓ but it's it's really solid there.

speaker-2: If I had to imagine there's probably two big things that executives worry about. And you pick your C level executive, but reducing risk, right? They don't want to be the next company showing up in the newspaper and making our business more efficient, right? Save us money somehow by doing more with less. Well, that directly relates to our solutions, right? Reducing risk, print servers for years have been risk, right? From a from a risk management. Eliminating infrastructure is a great way to reduce risk. Making your business more efficient, I mean, if I can reduce infrastructure, I can eliminate help desk tickets because I'm not having users call the help desk anymore to have their printer added. I've made my business more efficient. So if that those are two big things that probably any executive is is looking out for.

speaker-0: When we were talking before we got started, Brent, you made a comment and I and I want to call back to it where you said, We already did the work. They just have to come to us. Right. So this entire process that we went through to receive the ATO and to be ready to go, you know, and and you mentioned we've built security in from the ground up and and we are. We are ready to go. We've put in the work and and I I just have to believe that whether you are an individual contributor that's knocking out Tickets, help desk tickets, or all the way up to the person whose maybe even career is on the line because they're signing a solution that if it doesn't work and it results in a breach, that could be the end, right? That could be significant downside ⁓ for that individual or for that organization. And and I I think I wanna wrap up with this is just give each of you, Brent, we'll start with you, each of you an opportunity to speak to the relief. That some of these individuals feel knowing that this solution not only works for what it needs to do, but it also works with the security side, you know, al along every step of the way, which is that that modernization, consolidation, and automation.

speaker-2: Yeah, I'd like to start to say, like I mean, the the journey of Vasion, right? More than ten years ago, we started this SaaS journey. And what that means is we didn't put a couple of servers up in the cloud and call it SaaS, right? We built a mature global SaaS solution. And for more than 10 years, customers have been using that. We started this FedRamp journey a few years ago and we just built upon that, right? And just built the security that was needed to get that FedRamp high authorization. And that comes with we've done all the work, right? You just need to subscribe. You just need to come on board. We've done all the accreditations. We've done all the authorizations. You can check that all that stuff out, but we've all done the work. And all you need to do is simply use this the software that which you've already told you is simple to implement, reduces that risk, makes those help the sickness go away, right? When we put our full value to a cus into a customer's hand and they realize all that we can do for them, many times the answer really is just when can we get started?

speaker-1: I mean, just to add on to that, I guess there's there's kind of a reason that we are somewhat a d of a de facto solution in some of the most secure spaces in the entire world. ⁓ the way that we have architected the solution and the way that we have designed a tool that is universally applicable, has an obvious business case and an ROI case, ⁓ and also has that kind of ease of implementation, I guess I'll say, all of that rolled into one solution and packaged and ready to go all underneath that FedRamp ATO really kind of signs seals in that and delivers that package to say, whenever you're ready.

speaker-0: Gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us today. ⁓ this has been an incredible conversation with so many wonderful points, but I think that it speaks to ⁓ the demand ⁓ for for secure software ⁓ at the highest levels of federal agencies, and it is exciting to be part of a team that can offer that. And so we're very excited to have both of you with us, and we look forward to having you back.