Interview with Cybernews: Tavs Dalaa Talks About Printing in the Cloud

Dear reader, since the publication of this article, EveryonePrint has been acquired by Y Soft. Please keep this in mind as you read about the origin of EveryonePrint. The Hybrid Cloud Platform (HCP) product is now called SAFEQ Cloud - and since you're reading this past July 2022, we're officially part of the Y Soft brand. we're keeping this article alive for the purpose of giving you the behind-the-scenes of how SAFEQ Cloud came to be. Enjoy your read.

Recently, EveryonePrint's CEO, Tavs Dalaa, did an interview with Cybernews. Here's what they talked about:

Tavs Dalaa, EveryonePrint: “IT teams tend to loathe print because it can cause a lot of unnecessary management and stress.”

Back in the day, handling various enterprise operations by hand was pretty much the only way. These days though, even the most unexpected areas can be digitized or facilitated with technology.

One of them – is print infrastructure management. At first glance, it might seem like a cakewalk. In reality, it takes a lot of time that could be spent on business mission-oriented tasks.

Today we chat with Tavs Dalaa, CEO of EveryonePrint, to learn more about how their product helps reduce maintenance pain, the print infrastructure issues that organizations are currently facing, and what safety measures should be taken other than just downloading antivirus software.

Tell us how it all began. How did the idea of EveryonePrint originate?

The EveryonePrint company story starts as most Danish stories do, beer in hand. Back in 2015, I was having a cold beer with a friend while talking about companies starting to move all of their IT to the cloud, well, not all of it. There was one piece being left behind—print servers. 

I decided to enlist some of my best developers and camp out in a hotel in Amsterdam. After some intense whiteboarding, the SAFEQ Cloud, former HCP, was born, and with it,  EveryonePrint set foot as a SaaS cloud enabler.

The business, however, was founded well before then and started its first big chapter with a  Mobile Print solution back in 2010.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you do? What are the main challenges you help navigate?

EveryonePrint is software that takes your print infrastructure to the cloud. We’ve created a SaaS solution that makes it easy for all types and sizes of organizations to migrate their print to the cloud, streamline print infrastructure, and remove print management pains. 

We help our customers go cloud-first and get rid of expensive print servers that are a pain to maintain. To reduce maintenance pain, we help customers unify and centrally manage all their printers, regardless of brand and model. That way, they can let go of print management and not have to think about it. It just works — autonomously in the background. This takes the pressure off IT and allows them to re-focus on mission-oriented tasks.

We’re on a mission to disrupt the print industry and empower organizations to meet their digital transformation and sustainability goals through innovation for today's needs and future possibilities.

What are the most common issues associated with the current printing infrastructure?

As a tech guy myself, I know IT teams tend to loathe print because it can cause a lot of unnecessary management and stress. Traditional printing infrastructures are high maintenance and demand a lot of hours that could be spent more strategically. With cloud print software, IT  can refocus their resources where they matter – not on the print.

Traditional infrastructure is antiquated, slow, and unreliable. They come with a wave of tickets, support demand, and security hassles. Cloud-first options make IT infrastructures more secure, resilient, flexible, and scalable.

Did the recent global events alter your field of work in any way? Were there any new features added to your products as a result?

The global pandemic: A lot of our customers closed offices and were forced to work from home— while corporate assets remained in-office, lying idle. This forced many companies to accelerate their digital transformation journey and figure out how to quickly move their internal data and tools to the cloud to make it possible to work from home or in a hybrid model.

A lot of companies came back post-pandemic looking for IT solutions significantly more flexible and scalable than the ones they had before – cloud printing started becoming crucial for companies worldwide, and HCP started gaining more and more traction.

There were also new guidelines recommended for limiting or restricting the use of high-touch items and equipment such as printers and MFPs. As a result, we introduced a contactless printing feature that enables end-users to seamlessly and safely print without touching the printer or multifunction device’s control panel.

The War in Ukraine: There’s no denying the war has a lot of businesses on edge with cybersecurity – and with good reason. As a result, we’re seeing customers prioritize advanced security, looking for solutions that keep their data extra safe and protected.  

Data sovereignty is also top-of-mind today – and our customers come to us looking for a way to keep control over encryptions, data access, and data residency with zero-trust requirements.  HCP, now SAFEQ Cloud, is ISO 27001 certified and hosted on AWS in five different locations with three availability zones per location, which gives us extra high cloud availability.

Since the print industry is your main field of focus, what predictions do you have for the future of this sector?

A big trend we’re seeing in our field of focus is that customers are steering away from fixed assessment costs and embracing SaaS licensing and subscription models. Chip shortages are causing a lack of hardware, which is challenging the print industry in getting new customers as well as retaining existing ones.

The pandemic is letting businesses rethink their strategy around print to make managing it far more flexible while giving customers global control.

Another prediction is that customers will be looking for service contracts where vendors are incentivized to help them on a sustainability level, by reducing the scale of print jobs necessary; i.e., obstructing unnecessary printing and reducing the margin for printing errors.

In your opinion, what issues do companies run into most often during the digital transformation process?

What we’re experiencing is that companies often focus a lot on retainment and run into complications when operationalizing their digital transformation efforts. Especially when it comes to security, customers need to be clear on their options, how they migrate, and what it does for their security going forward. This is why we see a lot more security questions on the cloud side of the print industry. 

Moving to the cloud means users and data reside there while printers remain on-premises, so what does that mean for our customers? The solution, at least, is finding software that follows zero-trust requirements as they deliver a service for both on-premise and cloud.

What other aspects of business operations do you hope to see automated or enhanced by technology in the next few years?

Our vision is that print can be consumed as a service in the same ways as WiFi or electricity – commoditized – something everyone has but no one is burdened with managing since our software manages most of it for them. 

We see this as a way to effectively enable customers to focus on their business, while we focus on improving our product and solving print issues before they touch the client. Their only job is to add new printers to their environment, which they can do online, autonomously, and very quickly.

What predictions do you have for the future of the cloud landscape? 

I believe customers are going to adopt multi-cloud/hybrid-cloud more and in a way that allows them to link their cloud print with other cloud solutions, like document and filing systems, so everything becomes one supercharged IT ecosystem in the cloud. When and where data is located and accessed will also become increasingly important for customers in our industry.

What does the future hold for EveryonePrint?

Our number one priority is working towards making print a commodity that is easy for customers to opt-in and out of as well as scale up and down. We want to support customers to access intelligent document services in the simplest way and make print infrastructures so robust and easy to manage that they completely remove the headache of IT leaders and teams.

Original Publishing: Cybernews Interview