Mark Asbridge, Head of Business Consultancy at MyQ talks about some of the new developments within the company’s flagship MyQ X on-premise offering as well as the key benefits of its MyQ Roger cloud-native solution
Michelle Ryder (MR): Your background is in the reseller channel and you’re relatively new to MyQ, what’s it been like working for a software developer company so far?
Mark Asbridge (MA): I joined MyQ in November last year, and it’s been a really interesting journey. Moving from a reseller team over into a software development company, working alongside some of the greatest people has been fantastic.
MR: What does your role involve?
MA: So, my previous role was looking at it from a software sales side of things, whereas now my role incorporates all teams in all departments. What we’re doing is integrating our product teams, our sales teams and our marketing teams. We are a development house, we have an awful lot of developers, and it’s converting that into our sales side and into our marketing side.
It’s understanding why those features and functionalities are important, and the developers need to understand the real world in the industry so that we can make sure that the products are developed in the correct way. So, my role is very much working with all of the teams at MyQ from head office, joining them all together and bringing all this industry knowledge to develop the products in the future.
MR: A recent IDC report highlighted that MyQ is the fastest growing software solution in the sector, which is great news. At the end of last year, you made some significant changes to your flagship MyQ X on-premise offering, can you run through the highlights?
MA: Yes, it was fantastic news for MyQ, we are one of the fastest growing, and we are still continuing to grow, we’re opening up different regions all of the time. We’re expanding quite rapidly, but obviously with that rapid deployment also comes rapid development of the product.
We recently launched 10.2 version of MyQ X. We always talk about being a user-centric product, and about the user interaction with the terminal devices. But we’re also looking to understand interactions with IT administrators – how do they consider and onboard the product, how do they do the settings, how do they get users in and how they customise it? From the server point of view, we’ve added almost one click, automated installation processes. You can install MyQ within
a matter of minutes.
Then from a terminals point of view, this is where the most enhancements for users have been. The UI now has a completely new touch and feel. We’ve enabled simple things like browsing OneDrive or SharePoint destinations. We’ve added favourite actions, for me that’s the absolute key highlight of the product, because previously, users relied on the administrator to create their scan actions or scan destinations. But a lot of users have different folders in their OneDrive and their SharePoint.
Everybody’s got their own way of designing files and structures, which is an administrator’s worst nightmare, because they might have 1,000 people asking them for 1,000 different folders or 1,000 different workflows, and that’s unreasonable. With favourite actions, users can create their own bespoke actions and select all the parameters that they want for a scan action, whether it’s colour, black and white, double-sided PDF, TIFF file, whatever the administrator allows them to change.
We’re also enhancing our security; we recently added new Windows Protected Print so we now have native IPPS printing. There are lots of enhancements that we’ve done in 10.2 but at MyQ we always talk about agile development, so it isn’t like here’s 10.2 and that’s what it is until the next version. This is where we are today, but we’re now talking about how we can make more enhancements for the next patch.
MR: You also have the cloud-native MyQ Roger product – there are a couple of versions of that aren’t there, can you explain the difference?
MA: We’ve designed it in two slightly different ways. We have a personalised account and a standard corporate account. Anybody can download the MyQ Roger app, it’s recently had over one million downloads, so it’s a well used application. Users can register with their own personal details, and it allows them to digitise documents for free. With an internet connection, you can start capturing documents and it’s not just taking the picture, MyQ Roger has clever enhancements where it will start auto rotating and correcting the angles.
We have also enhanced the platform with AI capabilities within the personalised area. You can now link into ChatGPT, a lot of people are now scanning in documents, but they might want to translate it, they might want to extract key information or summarise the document. With the MyQ Roger application, not only can you take pictures and auto rotate and capture, you can now also ask it for an AI response of what that document is.
MR: And how does the corporate version differ?
MA: The app is completely the same, it just depends on whether you’re logging in from a personal or corporate account.
You have a complete cloud-native hybrid working solution wherever you are in the world, if you’re in an office with an MFD or on your mobile phone, it’s the same system. The key point from an administrator’s point of view is that you have only got to manage one platform.
Security is really key, when we start talking about where the data travels, there is a lot of flexibility within the platform of where data gets sent.
So, for example, if you’ve got highly confidential data, but you’re in a zero trust network environment, you want to keep your data in your own OneDrive, and that’s what we’re able to do with MyQ. Rather than sending it to MyQ cloud servers, you’re able to keep that data in your own personal OneDrive so it never leaves your environment.
MR: Naturally, we need to touch on the hot topic of the moment – AI. What’s next on the roadmap for MyQ and how will you leverage AI to make it even better?
MA: Ai is the buzzword for all of the industry at the moment and for very good reasons. We need to look at it in a few different ways – how does MyQ use AI, how can we use AI for our partners, and how do we then use AI for our customers?
If we’re implementing AI, it needs to be for beneficial reasons. Internally, we’re using it for content creation, content writing, because it speeds up those processes. We’re also using it for some of the imagery creations as well. When we start looking at marketing and LinkedIn, everybody in the industry is now starting to utilise it.
If we look at how we utilise AI for our partners, we’ve had an AI chatbot on our documentation website for a few years. That allows partners or users to ask technical questions – how do I set up OneDrive or how do I set up cost centres, directly into our documentation site, rather than trying to find exactly where the right article is within the site. What it will then do is give back a high level overview of the documentation, but it’ll also give you the links.
What we’re looking at doing now is integrating the bot on the partner side of the product. They’ll be able to search all of their partner questions and answers.
When we look at MyQ X we are in the process of developing and reviewing that structure, because MyQ scanning capabilities have been industry leading for a number of years, but we’re now starting to see this whole AI scanning process where we need to do something a little bit more with it.
What we’re starting to do now is look at how we’re going to develop those scanning processes and how we’re going to capture additional data, utilising AI. It’s on our roadmap that we’re currently reviewing, and we will launch information about the AI scanning process and the enhancements we’re going to make. I mentioned earlier on about translations, document summaries, redactions and extractions – that’s what people want in a product, and as much as we can do it now, we need a more streamlined and easier way to complete those tasks.
MR: In terms of AI, I know you’ve got an event in the autumn coming up, I suspect there’ll be a lot more to announce then, but can you share a little bit more now?
MA: It is going to be a fantastic event, we’ve invited all of our partners and OEMs from around the world, and at that event, they’re going to get a preview of what is to come with MyQ X.
