“The traditional model has been having a print server at every location…if we come in and eliminate all of those for a fraction of the cost and provide a much easier way to manage the whole thing, people get excited.”
Because you don’t own a business consisting of hundreds of individuals, you probably don’t understand the problem I’m about to describe. Which is fine, considering I own zero businesses consisting of zero people. But rest assured, large companies spread across different locations experience pain caused by print servers daily.
The actual process of changing print servers — the device that connects printers to client computers over a network — is a headache. It sounds like it would be fairly simple, maybe disconnect this cable and plug in that one. It’s not.
“When you move a printer over, there’s more to it than you think,” PrinterLogic COO Ryan Wedig told Beehive Startups in a recent interview. “You have to understand who had that printer installed and you have to reassociate that workstation with the printer itself so the end-user doesn’t feel like they have to install new printers. It doesn’t sound like a big deal until you’re dealing with companies like Pfizer, JP Morgan, Chase, and these people have 100,000 workstations that have to be re-mapped manually. You’re talking about year-long projects to get printers back to the right people.”
Founded by Jarrett Taylor and based in Saint George, Utah, PrinterLogic was designed to cure the numerous problems that accompany print servers. If something is causing you pain, keeping it around makes no sense. So rather than trying to improve print servers, PrinterLogic seeks to eliminate them.
“The traditional model has been having a print server at every location,” Wedig said. “So if I have 400 locations around the United States, I need one print server at every location. Those print servers run about $4,000 a year to maintain and operate. So, if we come in and eliminate all of those for a fraction of the cost and provide a much easier way to manage the whole thing, people get excited.”
PrinterLogic’s web-based app allows companies to eliminate print servers and in the process, simplify printer management at a drastically reduced cost. If that doesn’t sound super valuable to a smaller company, imagine the value at a place like the Department of Homeland Security, one of PrinterLogic’s many clients. The years of work that it would take to switch servers is now a moot point because there are no servers.
Remember, simple is better. Simple and cheaper? That’s the best.
Just because they reside in the den of old people known as Saint George, doesn’t mean their business is concentrated in one place. With their service providing the most value to super-large companies, PrinterLogic’s clients are spread throughout the world: Expedia, Walgreens, United Nations, even the Australian Department of Health.
“We like geographically disparate locations, because the further apart those locations are, the higher the need is for having more print servers,” Wedig said. “The more print servers you have, the nastier the problem, and the better our value proposition becomes. We definitely have to sell nationally and globally to find the customers that we’re looking for.”
Taking care of national clients — or any clients, for that matter — obviously requires employees. After growing at a 350 percent rate for the last two years, PrinterLogic currently employs close to 55 people. Most work in Saint George, with a select few sprinkled throughout America and Canada.
“We’re 100 percent bootstrapped, all organic growth, and we expect to continue doing that at a pretty strong clip,” Wedig said. “Outside funding is not a focus for us at all. When we look at our plans and how much we want to spend to keep growing at 350 percent, the numbers right now show we’re going to be able to do that. We sell a lot of software, so we have good revenue coming in.”
Eliminating print servers might not sound like the most glamorous of missions, but it fulfills a very real need in an old, outdated industry. PrinterLogic has become the world’s leading enterprise printer management solution and done so with all-natural growth.
And as they continue to consume the souls of print servers across the globe, all while giving an added boost to the Utah startup scene, the mission starts to seem a little more glamorous.
Published 4/16/2015
