Michelle Ryder spoke to Vasion CEO Ryan Wedig about the company’s channel-first strategy and why partners are central to accelerating adoption of intelligent print automation following its recent launch to market
When the company launched in 2012, then operating under the PrinterLogic brand, its tagline – eliminate print servers – was simple and at the time, highly disruptive. Today, as cloud adoption continues to accelerate, that proposition has become the norm, but according to Wedig, it took years of persistence to convince both customers and channel partners that a different approach to print infrastructure was possible.
“It took us about five years of pounding that message and actually winning deals for it to become a reasonable statement. Up to that point, it was very provocative,” he said.
While MPS providers were primarily focused on hardware sales, Vasion approached the market from an IT infrastructure perspective. Wedig brought networking expertise from Cisco Systems, while his co‑founder had extensive systems administration experience.
“The technology behind how you would eliminate your print servers without making a mess was not something most MPS providers could easily manage. They didn’t have the technicians to be able to describe the network connectivity requirements. I was deep into network technology and understanding how to eliminate print servers. My partner was a sysadmin for the state of Utah, he very much understood network connectivity, so we came at it from a completely different angle,” he explained.
A difficult start in the channel
Despite Wedig’s goal to adopt a channel- led model, the company’s early years were dominated by direct sales.
Having previously worked exclusively through partners at Cisco, Wedig initially wanted to replicate that approach. “We really wanted to only sell through partners,” he explained. “But what I found out really quickly was that with a disruptive message that saves customers so much money, people can’t make as much money on your solution, you don’t exactly make friends in the channel.”
As a result, Vasion built a direct sales organisation focused on engaging with IT decision-makers rather than print specialists. “If we wanted to survive, we had to get to the IT professionals and describe how we were going to get rid of scripting, GPOs and print servers, and how that ROI lined up with their private cloud strategy,” he added.
The strategy proved highly successful. As cloud adoption accelerated, Vasion’s proposition aligned closely with broader infrastructure modernisation initiatives. Over time, more vendors began adopting similar language around print server elimination, helping to validate the market opportunity.
“There’s a big difference between not needing print servers and actually eliminating the need for print servers,” Wedig noted, adding: “What we saw them do is decouple their technologies from requiring a print server to work. But what we were doing was something actually quite different. We were replacing all the functionality of the print server.
“We enjoyed 500% to 600% growth in the early phases and then moved into 70% and 60% growth rates. Even today, we target 30% growth, which is a very aggressive place to be in a declining market.”
The channel catches up
According to Wedig, the channel environment that exists today is far more receptive to Vasion’s model than it was a decade ago.
When organisations accelerated digital transformation initiatives during and after the pandemic, many MPS providers began evolving into MSPs. At the same time, recurring annual revenue models became increasingly important.
“Post-COVID, seeing 10% to 20% of MPS providers convert towards MSPs created a major opportunity for us,” he said, pointing out that the company’s MSP portal, originally developed in 2016 and launched in 2019, has become a significant growth engine.
Vasion now supports more than 14,000 customers worldwide. Around 6,000 are large enterprise customers, while approximately 8,000 are served through the MSP ecosystem.
“The 8,000 customers through that MSP portal are indirect customers and that’s the only way they can buy our product,” he added.
The portal allows MSPs to manage multiple customers through a single interface, provide first-line support and integrate billing directly into their own operational systems. “You have to be able to create a monthly billing model,” Wedig explained. “You need to give them access to the system and the ability to manage customers from a single pane of glass.”
With more than 750 MSP partners globally, the growth potential is huge.“What’s cool about the model is that whether you have two customers with five printers each or tens of thousands of devices, you can plug into that and resell very easily.”
AI readiness starts with cloud-native
Another factor strengthening partner engagement is the growing focus on AI. Wedig argues that many legacy print management platforms that were simply moved into hosted environments lack the architectural foundations needed to support emerging AI-driven workflows.
“Our product is built as a SaaS- native platform that can be AI-ready,” he said. Because Vasion was built cloud-native, the company has been able to integrate directly with AI services and large language models, enabling intelligent document processing and workflow automation.
“We’ve been able to pull in AI models that can interrogate documents and give customers an agnostic selection of models based on what’s fastest, best or most cost-effective.”
Moving towards a partner-led future
As market demand increases, Vasion is becoming progressively more partner- focused. “The product is pulling now,” Wedig explained, adding: “When we showed up, we had to push our product into the market. Now channel partners are coming to us.”
The company is building on its strong presence in France, Germany and the UK, focusing on partner-only go-to-market models in several regions. One example is Southern Europe, where a dedicated Spanish and Italian speaking account executive and engineer have been recruited to support growth.
“They can only sell through partners in Italy and Spain,” Wedig explained. “We want to experiment with this idea and see how fast and how hard we can push it.”
The long-term objective remains unchanged from the company’s earliest days. “It’s really getting back to my original dream, which is to only sell through partners. It’s coming full circle,” he added.
Strong momentum in the UK
The UK has emerged as one of Vasion’s most important growth markets. 33% of net new logos across EMEA during 2026 have come through the channel. In the UK, that figure rises to 75%.
To support continued expansion, the company opened a major Executive Briefing Centre in Frankfurt last year and at the time of going to press was preparing to establish a new London office.
While the UK market presents significant opportunity, Wedig emphasises that local expertise remains essential. “The UK has its own laws and there’s a lot of nuance,” he said. “Being able to navigate that through partners is incredibly valuable.”
Equally important are the trusted relationships developed by established channel businesses. “When I go on customer visits with channel partners, the relationships go deep. They go back 15 or 20 years and there’s a lot of trust,” he added.
For Vasion, becoming an extension of those trusted advisor relationships provides a significant competitive advantage. Wedig continued: “If we can tie into that trust and become part of that trusted network, it’s such a powerful way to accelerate growth.”
The company has already established major customer references across financial services, healthcare and public sector organisations throughout Europe. Those successful deployments are helping drive further momentum.
From print management to intelligent automation
Vasion is well-known on the end-user print side, in particular for its ability to manage the unmanaged A4 printers. One growth area is output management, particularly around ERP-driven critical business printing.
Many organisations continue to rely on legacy output management technologies that were designed long before cloud computing, AI and modern workflow automation became mainstream.
At the same time, while office print volumes continue their gradual decline, other print environments are expanding rapidly. “Label printers are growing at 130% to 140% a year,” Wedig noted.
However, the biggest strategic opportunity lies in what Vasion describes as Intelligent Print Automation (IPA). Launched in June, IPA aims to address a challenge that Wedig believes most organisations have overlooked – dark data.
Every time users print, save documents as PDFs or scan information into unmanaged repositories, enterprise data becomes unstructured and quietly goes dark. Dark data escapes compliance controls, bypasses AI workflow and quickly becomes a liability.
IPA seamlessly integrates with any application to intelligently route documents to virtually any destination, ensuring organisations’ business intelligence does not go dark again.
While PrinterLogic remains part of the broader Vasion platform, IPA adds eForms, eSignature, OCR-enabled storage, and agentic document processing, all managed through custom no-code workflows. For existing customers, IPA sits within their existing infrastructure. For new customers, it’s a single platform entry point that replaces what would otherwise require multiple vendors and months of integration work.
Keeping humans in the loop
Looking ahead, Vasion’s AI strategy centres on combining automation with transparency and governance. One of the company’s upcoming releases introduces agentic AI capabilities directly into workflow automation processes. Crucially, customers can see exactly where AI is being used and what it costs.
“We break down line-by-line the actual cost of every workflow every time it runs,” Wedig explained. That visibility addresses two questions he says CIOs are increasingly asking, how much AI costs, and how organisations maintain human oversight.
“About 90% of business processes are deterministic. You want them to work the same way every time,” he said. “There’s another 10% where you need reasoning and advanced AI.”
Rather than applying AI indiscriminately, Vasion enables organisations to insert agentic AI only where genuine value exists, while maintaining approval stages and human review throughout the process. “Not every workflow should be running through AI,” he added. “We think we provide the best of both worlds.”
For a company that began by challenging conventional wisdom around print servers, it is a familiar position. This time, the conversation is broader, encompassing dark data, intelligent automation and AI readiness. Yet the underlying strategy remains remarkably consistent: solve infrastructure challenges, embrace disruptive thinking and increasingly do it through trusted channel partners.
