In this interview with PrintIT Reseller, Nigel Eaton, General Manager at MyQ talks about some of the challenges companies face when managing their print infrastructure, the emergence of AI and how it is impacting the company’s go-to-market strategy and product positioning, as well as providing a sneak preview into what’s next for MyQ
PrintIT Reseller (PITR): MyQ has a robust suite of solutions designed to meet a range of customers’ needs whether on-premise or in the cloud. What would you define as major challenges for companies when managing their print infrastructure?
Nigel Eaton (NE): The marketplace as we’ve known it over the past few years has turned on its head. It’s become a lot more dynamic than it’s ever been. We are, for example, seeing things like AI becoming more common. We’re also very clearly aware that the world has changed in terms of security. If you look at print estates, we know that print volumes are declining and that scan volumes are rising. The other thing that we’re seeing in the market is smaller printer fleets, fewer devices – and those devices need to be more robust and offer more functions.
At MyQ, we build a lot of our infrastructure around making sure users have the ability to walk up to a device without any confusion or complexity that ruins their efficiency. By doing that they can get to a device, they can see what they want to do straight away, they can perform a task and be back to their desk without wasting time. Time is obviously money. But also, if you consider environmental concerns, the less time a copier is in use, the less energy it’s using.
That person also doesn’t need to be sitting in an office. With the MyQ Roger app, they can scan a document and send it off to a colleague or into a workflow within 30-40 seconds. So that’s the biggest change I think in the marketplace is how you enable customers to take that journey from working in the office five days a week through to working anywhere at any time, making all the tools and functions available to them, while still being able to meet their security and efficiency demands.
PITR: Artificial intelligence is fast becoming mainstream; how do you see this impacting My Q’s go-to-market strategy and product positioning?
NE: Over the last 12 months, AI has become a really hot topic and is becoming more common in the marketplace now. That’s been boosted largely by the launch of AI tools such as ChatGPT and its adoption in certain markets such as education, and equally, developers are now beginning to move away from petitioning code, because AI can do some of that work for them.
AI is not a new thing. It’s been around since the 50s, in fact the first real area of AI that came into the printing world was OCR. OCR is a form of AI in that it’s taking information from a document, reading it and then doing something with it. What we’re now seeing is companies who are focusing more on looking at the content of a document. So, the next generation of AI is able to read a document, understand what the document is actually saying and then route it according to what it finds within it.
The challenge to organisations is how to apply that from a paper-based document, rather than from a born digital document where it’s a relatively straightforward task. With the MyQ suite of solutions, we have to consider that – not just for customers who are sitting in the office with all the IT infrastructure behind them and an MFP they can use to scan hardcopy documents, but also for people using a mobile device or working from home, as they need to be able to be able to work as effectively as if they were in the office.
From our own point of view, we’ve introduced AI tools. We’ve got AI OCR running on our mobile apps so we’re interacting with documents along those lines. On the customer service side of things, we’ve implemented AI tools to help our customers not just dig for information around our standard documents, but to also ask a simple question and the AI bots will answer it and provide the references to where that information was found. That’s a really useful feature. And of course, our development team are working more and more with these technologies too.
PITR: You’ve touched on artificial intelligence, and we’ve got cloud as well also becoming mainstream.
NE: Organisations are on the journey either into cloud or further into cloud, and there are a lot of things for them to consider in that area. Efficiency for example and of course security is a huge one.
When we had customers based within a secure IT environment managed by internal IT, everything was secure. But we’ve now got people working remotely, maybe working from home two to three days a week, but not in an office where the infrastructure is owned by the organisation, and therefore security is an area we’ve got to look at.
From the software point of view, we’re getting a lot more questions around things like penetration testing and whether our development is secure. As a software manufacturer we’ve got to be hot on our security, we’ve got to be watching the trends in the marketplace to make sure that the things that are happening we’re following suit with, and obviously the rise of things like cloud storage are a big part of that. MyQ has direct connection with OneDrive, SharePoint and Google Drive, that’s important because that’s where customers are storing their documents.
So, for example, it’s now perfectly possible to walk up to a device, access a network folder or a cloud repository for a document, to preview that document on the device, make sure it’s the right document, make any changes to it and then print it all without the need to actually have a PC with you. MyQ Roger was designed to do all of those things, but to give the user the ability to do that when sitting in a cafe.
We introduced subscription licencing a couple of years ago to give customers the flexibility to be able to move into cloud and away from an on-premise solution. So, if they were running on MyQ X, it’s seamless to come to a natural stop, move to cloud and take a My Q Roger subscription and move into full cloud.
PITR: What’s next for My Q?
NE: The first thing to look at is our flagship product – MyQ X which will see improvements in the user interface. That’s already one of our key features, particularly for those customers who use it in a mixed fleet environment, because they are used to their own personalised interface irrespective of the device. There are also some improvements on the administration side as well as we continue to develop the product and make it easier for admins to roll out printers into queues and devices but also to centralise functions and connectivity to things like cloud storage.
The important thing with any product is to talk to your customers and understand their requirements. MyQ Roger has become a product in demand in the enterprise sector, so we need to meet certain needs there. So, there’ll be a brand new management console coming into MyQ Roger relatively soon and that will be centralised functions. For example, things like the management of workflows, or more robust reporting suite, cost centres, those sorts of functions. That’s coming on the back of the recently introduced MyQ Roger desktop client, which has allowed us for example now to interact with single function devices and open this up more to print from pretty much any device you have in your office.
We are also introducing a brand new concept to the market and that’s called print sharing. The idea is put print somewhere people want to use it, so MyQ print sharing is a standalone kiosk where customers can self-register, print, scan and copy, pay for their interaction on their smartphone and then move away. It’s the ability to put something into a hotel business centre, into a shared workspace or into an airport. People can interact with the device in a public area without the need for it to be staffed, without the IT infrastructure complexity that would necessarily sit behind it, with a very simple self- registration and pay as you use facility.
There’s also MyQ Next – our next- generation product. It will replace MyQ X and it will come to market somewhere around the end of 2024.
