In this interview with PrintIT Reseller, Andy Bryant, Sales Director EMEA at Vasion explains what the company’s strategy to enable digital transformation for everyone, really means. He also talks about how Vasion has broadened its focus beyond print solutions into areas like e-forms, digital signatures, and document scanning, and reveals plans to scale the business and deliver on its goal to become a channel-led organisation. Here’s an excerpt of the conversation
Michelle Ryder (MR): Let’s begin by talking about Vasion’s strategy to enable digital transformation for everyone.
Andy Bryant (AB): When I joined Vasion, one of the things that really stood out for me is how the company, top down, really believe in the vision. There are areas within the technology that make that attainable – it’s a cloud-ready architecture, so we can be agile, we can scale and it’s cost-effective.
The software is also designed to be very intuitive and easy to use, it’s low-code, no-code, which is especially important. But what really impressed me is that Ryan Wedig, our CEO, is passionate about bringing that to life, and that flows down through his exec team and every employee.
Everyone genuinely believes that we’re on this journey to make digital transformation attainable for everyone. Ryan works with a lot of not-for-profit organisations in Africa, in the Philippines and in South America and tests our technology, to see if it really does work for everyone.
There is a great case study on our website about how we have worked with a children’s charity in Ghana. The founder believes she would need 20 people to replace what she’s achieved with our software. So, we’ve got the cloud-ready technology, a team that really believe and drive that vision, and a CEO who actually goes out and proves it really is possible for everyone.
MR: Vasion is probably best-known for its mature cloud-native PrinterLogic cloud platform which in 2020, evolved to become a part of the wider Vasion Automate platform. In terms of the print management piece, what are the key USPs?
AB: The cloud-native architecture is very scalable; we have customers with two or three printers up to (in the US) over 100,000 printers. We have a multi-tier product with ERP printing, and we have the ability to do digital workflow, electronic content management and forms, but print is still really important. It’s not going away. We are continuing to evolve the print side of the product. We have 13,800 customers globally that have invested in that core product.
MR: For me, one of the key things about the Vasion Print piece is that you can ‘manage the unmanaged’ so standalone printers that aren’t connected to customers’ MPS contracts.
AB: Yes, we capture all print devices, and that’s a key differentiator. Another thing that was fairly new to me is direct IP printing, so if for whatever reason, you lost connection to the internet
and couldn’t connect to the platform, you’re still able to print. That’s where the scalability comes in, even if there was a break in connection, the product still works.
MR: As Vasion broadens its focus beyond print solutions into areas like e-forms, digital signatures, and document scanning, how are you looking to scale the business and in particular deliver on your goal to become a channel-led business?
AB: Currently, 80% of our business in the US is through the channel, in EMEA and APAC, it’s around 40%, but our sole drive and focus is to be channel-led.
We’re looking to onboard partners and we’re looking to grow and scale through the channel. Our account executives are happy to fulfil deals direct or through the channel, and often we prefer to go through the channel, because there are already relationships in place, so there’s no conflict within our organisation.
We’re really driving heavily down the channel route and when we move into workflow, electronic forms, digital signatures and the broader portfolio that we now have, we are going to rely on the expertise and the professional services of partners. It’s not an area that we want to focus on. We’d like to fulfil that through our channel partners.
MR: Vasion has a customer base of over 13,000 global users, how will you leverage that experience to empower channel partners to capitalise on the opportunity to serve organisations seeking comprehensive digital solutions?
AB: We regularly have customer or partner councils, where customers and partners can give us direct feedback. We’re truly customer-centric, and we have a board that engage and roll
their sleeves up. Our CTO has been on dozens of my customer calls, he wants to listen, he wants to understand what the challenges are, what the key problems are. All of that knowledge and experience is being fed back into the product, which will benefit the channel and our partners.
MR: Does partnering with Vasion require partners to upskill? How easy is it to deploy your solution?
AB: We’re rolling out Vasion Print to a customer in the US with over 100,000 devices. They originally planned to deploy over 18 months to two years. But when they found out how easy it
is to deploy, they started rolling out 10,000 devices a week. But I don’t want to forget the smaller customers, those with 5, 10, 25 devices, it can be installed in minutes.
Obviously if we scale, there’s a little bit more planning and control around how that’s rolled out, but overall, it’s extremely easy to deploy. When you move into other products, like our advanced security add-on, then you’re dealing with vendors’ hardware and firmware, there’s more complexity, but it’s still very easy to roll out. With Vasion Output, where we deal with ERP systems and print, the product is easy to deploy, but there’s more complexity working with ERP systems. It’s critical print. It can’t go down.
MR: And the revenue potential?
AB: It’s a very different model to traditional print partners, where the page volume can go up and down and it can vary their earnings. This is an annual recurring revenue model, so partners can build their ARR year on year. They can add additional software and cross- sell across the wider platform, upselling the licenses they’ve already sold. The potential to add services is huge when we move into content management, electronic forms and workflow.
MR: What areas in particular will you look to support partners in?
AB: Although the product and the platform is intuitive and scalable, we still need to onboard partners, we need to train them and we need to provide them with marketing collateral. So, we’re investing quite heavily in a partner training program. We’re also working with our marketing team, we have a huge amount of collateral that would benefit our partners, so we can co-brand or rebrand those assets to help our partners and we can do joint marketing events. I’m also currently working with several partners to look at how we help them with demand generation.
MR: I believe that Vasion is undergoing the process to achieve FedRAMP certification. Could you explain a little bit more about that?
AB: Yes, we are, initially I thought of that as very much an American certification, but actually it’s important to other regions too. This isn’t just a certification or a badge, it’s a year of development in the US, 90% of our development team are rebuilding the code to meet the stringent requirements of the US federal government.
So that’s 12 months of heavy development work, all of the heavy lifting is now done, then it has to go through sponsorship, and we put that forward for the FedRAMP approval, which we’re expecting imminently.
We believe we’re the only software vendor to achieve that. The code that we’ve already built that’s gone for certification is the same code that all of our EMEA and APAC customers use, so the architecture built for the US federal government is in place for every EMEA and APAC customer.
MR: How does AI play in your offering, and what plans are in place to expand the use of AI tools?
AB: We’ve recently added our own AI engine to our platform – VAI, which is Vasion AI. So, for example, you could go to VAI and request a report on all HP printers across your network, then you could ask it to rename all devices by model, name or location.
The other key element with the cloud-native technology is that we can provide digital solutions that leverage AI. As an example, a healthcare organisation in the US had a manual process where people check in for a procedure, taking that paper form to a digital form and obtaining their signature is a simple step we can do within our platform.
We then looked at what the medical institution was doing when that document came in. They were gathering other notes and taking data from their ERP system and then providing that to a consultant who had to read all that information and make a judgment call on the correct procedure.
We now use an AI engine called Comprehend, which will read all of that information and create a summary page for the consultant. Then when you move further down that process, you need to store that record for a certain period of time. But with PII, there’s certain information you can’t hold. So, we had to look at how we remove the PII information and redact it, so we passed that to another AI engine that redacts the document and brings it back in before storing it.
There are certain things we can do within the platform, so electronic forms, digital signatures, workflow, but there are other things where we can pass documents out, bring them back, and then move them along the workflow. That’s where we’re leveraging AI to help us on the journey towards making digital transformation attainable for everyone.
