Kevin Pickhardt Podcast Transcript
Kevin Pickhardt joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Kevin Pickhardt. Kevin Pickhardt is the Executive Chairman of Pharos Systems International, where he brings decades of leadership experience in scaling enterprise technology companies and guiding long-term growth strategies. In his role, Kevin focuses on strategic direction, governance, and ensuring Pharos continues to lead innovation in enterprise print management and cloud-native infrastructure.
With a strong background in building and advising technology-driven organizations, Kevin plays a key role in shaping Pharos’ vision around PrintOps, a modern data-driven approach that treats printing as a core enterprise IT service rather than a legacy afterthought. His leadership emphasizes operational discipline, customer trust, and sustainable growth across highly regulated and complex enterprise environments.
Well, good afternoon, Kevin. Welcome to the show.
Kevin Pickhardt: Thanks, Brian. Happy to join you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. You’re hailing out of Rochester, New York. I’m in Kansas City. So I always wanna acknowledge that it takes a lotta calendar shuffling and time zones to get here, so thank you. And Kevin, jumping into your first question, you joined Pharos as CEO back in 2001 and spent more than two decades leading the company through a fundamental transformation from traditional on-prem software to a modern cloud-native SaaS platform before transitioning to executive chairman in 2024.
What did you see in enterprise printing all those years ago that convinced you there was a real business there, and what have been the biggest inflection points in that long evolution?
Kevin Pickhardt: Yeah. Yeah, it i- it, boy, it… You’re dating me, Brian, talking about it as a long ev- evolution, but it, but it certainly is.
I, I started my career at Xerox always in technology. But that print side even going back 40 years ago. And one of the things that I, I realized before leaving Xerox and joining up with Pharos was that printing is one of those things that’s required in every single enterprise. Every single organization has printers.
They’re not going away e- even 40, here 40 years later. But the, the need for printing and for access to printed documents it still continues to be there even though, even though the, arguably the printing technology started 500 years ago with the with the digital printing press. But what, what’s most interesting from a Pharos standpoint is there’s no organization that wants to print more.
We all wanna be able to control it, secure it and, and really that’s where our focus has been, is the realization that printing is really about how users use it and not how the… It’s not about the devices, the printers themselves. So y- y- yeah, the printers continue to evolve, but all of that infrastructure from on-premises to now infrastructure in the cloud is the direction that everything is everything is going.
So, so while printing is not going away, all the technology that surrounds it needs to be brought up to date and up to speed with what’s happening in, in information technology in general
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I, I totally agree and talked about this particular topic, I think once or twice on the podcast before.
But we, we see it, we acknowledge it. In the security space printers are kind of an afterthought. We like the printer, it’s there, we need it when it’s there, but we’re not bringing those endpoints up to speed. But I appreciate that. You’ve got a lot of experience there, starting out at Xerox obviously, and moving into Pharos.
There’s a lot here that we could talk about. But, but again we’ll jump more into really the security around the devices. Kevin, like you’ve said, that unlike other IT systems in the modern office, printing hasn’t kept up with the standards for usability, interoperability, and security, that today’s printers are connected devices requiring oversight, but most organizations still treat them as machines that just process paper and toner.
Why has printing specifically been stuck in the past while the rest of enterprise IT modernized around it?
Kevin Pickhardt: Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a good question, and I, I think part of it ties back to how we think about printers and printing. We think about it as kind of a legacy technology. And when you look inside of organizations as to who has traditionally owned the responsibility for printers and printing early on it became owned by, by facilities very often.
The people who were, who were managing the floor, the floor layout and the same person who was responsible for cleaning services was also responsible for making sure that you had printers and, way back when, copiers. And that vestige still continues. Trying to find a single owner for who owns printing throughout an organization is extremely hard.
One person may own responsibility for the physical printer itself But all of the the endpoints, y- the desktops have to have drivers that connect to these things print servers inside of IT infrastructure. And then as you mentioned the security teams, very often printing is a, is, is a workflow that’s that’s not common to them, so, so they don’t look at it that way.
And so yeah, you’ve got these endpoint printers that are not always viewed as being owned by IT, and so they don’t oftentimes fit under that, that umbrella. Then you’ve got the printed document itself, which is, you know, what’s on the page, and who’s touching the page, who eventually ends up with it.
That’s a part of that security. And then you’ve got, as we were talking about before, the infrastructure. How does a print file get from my desktop to a printer somewhere on, on the floor? And in, and in most modern organizations, that’s a, that’s a digital workflow that is still today built on old technology.
It’s built on trust. The, the printer doesn’t know who you are. It just trusts that if you can send a file to it, it should print it. And that is, it’s really against today’s modern security zero trust standards. So printing should be zero trust. Printers should be authenticating, users should be authenticating.
There should be an honest broker in between that’s managing managing the flow of that information from you to the printer, and that’s just not how printing was designed. Microsoft is in the middle of re-architecting printing, making some of the biggest change that we’ve probably seen in decades to the printing stack inside of Windows.
And it’s specifically because of that, specifically because they’ve recognized that printing has not kept pace from a security standpoint with other IT technology, and it’s, and it’s really been a, a, a gap that has been exposed
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Yeah, we’re seeing just a proliferation of endpoint devices that whether it’s IoT, whether it’s a printer or whatnot, it’s kind of been an afterthought.
So I appreciate that. Y- y- definitely we, we kinda think of printers still as legacy technology. Some of us technologists may not, but s- sometime, we don’t even think of these printers as technology. We, we think, “Oh, there’s just toner and paper in there,” but they are a technology endpoint on the network.
And you talked about that management piece. There’s not a single ownership of that printer fle- fleet typically, and we’ve all seen that. IT doesn’t always own it but has a piece of it and… But at the end, at the end of the day, printers definitely need to be brought into the zero trust architecture and environment and I like what you offered up on the Microsoft, the latest and greatest there.
I think that’s, that’s a big game changer. So thank you. Kevin, you’ve emphasized that a modern print strategy has to support hybrid work, letting employees print securely from multiple networks, locations, devices, et cetera. How did the shift to distributed work change what enterprises need from printing, and what surprised you most about how print behavior changed once people stopped being tied to a single office?
Kevin Pickhardt: Yeah. Yeah. If you, if you go back for people who who started their career, certainly, pre pre-COVID, and COVID was such a, a big change in this whole nature of what we expect of, of work and hybrid work and how we expect to operate with technology. But z- certainly before COVID, people, people had their favorite printers.
You’d have a relationship with a, with, with a printer. My, my desktop would be tied directly to one or maybe two printers that were close to me inside the organization. I’d go into my or- go into my desk on a, on a daily basis. I might print five to seven times during the day and that print workflow was was established.
So, Move to hybrid and COVID and people start moving out of the offices, and all of a sudden you’ve got a couple of things that are, that are happening. One is everybody starts printing from home because that’s where they are which scares the heck out of these large enterprises because they have no control over a home printer and how it connects to, to your network, back to your your, your question earlier about, about security.
A- and then when we started coming back, we’re coming back but maybe not full time. Maybe some people remain hybrid. Maybe maybe we’re, we’re coming back to an organization where we don’t have dedicated desks, where we’re traveling, where we’re traveling around. And we break down this connection of an individual with an individual printer.
And what that really changes is the nature of how people start thinking about printing. I’m not printing to a printer. I am printing to a, a queue somewhere because I want something on paper, and I wanna be able to walk up to any printer anywhere in the enterprise and immediately be able to print and, and release my print files at that device.
So organizations have had to, to fundamentally change how they think about this nature of printing and devices from anywhere to anywhere, not from my desk to the printer down the hall. And that really fundamentally changes how we, how we think about and how we architect print environments. They have to become more distributed.
They have to become more systemic in terms of my print file being shift s-sent to a cloud, sent to off network, on network and really that’s been part of the driver of the emergence of this, this whole cloud infrastructure to support printing versus a fixed on-prem infrastructure.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. A lot has shifted. Obviously, we knew printing was gonna probably shift at some point, but COVID accelerated that. You talked about how they– the difference between pre-COVID, post-COVID in today’s hybrid environment. Employees are now printing at home. How do we secure that device or even that physical information that was printed out on paper?
Could be phys– could be sensitive, could be confidential. But I like how you kind of broke that out with cloud. Now everything’s in that cloud environment. Printing should be distributed from anywhere to anywhere, not just relegated to maybe a printer in my home office or, I’m sorry, my, my corporate office or just down the hall.
So thank you. And Kevin, the last question of the day, as cloud migration, zero trust security, AI, and hybrid work all continue to reshape enterprise IT, where do you see the future of printing and the broader infrastructure that supports secure modern workplaces heading over the next, let’s say, five, maybe even ten years?
And what role do you want Pharos to play in defining that future?
Kevin Pickhardt: Yeah, good, good question. Going back even early in my career it was predicted that print was a dying technology that printers and paper– We’re gonna have the paperless office, and I’ve I’ve not heard anybody talking about paperless offices, offices in years.
Our relationship with printers and printing has changed, but the reality is I think print is gonna outlive certainly my career and probably the career of most of the people listening. Print is still going to be a part of corporate environments and corporate infrastructure going forward, so it has to be modernized.
It has to be brought up to the latest the latest technologies, and you mentioned a number of them. You mentioned cloud zero trust security, AI, hybrid work we’ve, we’ve talked about. Printing has to fit in that new world of IT. If it doesn’t, which is what we have found to date, if we don’t change and modernize that infrastructure number one, print will break because generally print is not considered a cloud-native process.
So we have to re-architect that. And secondly, we talked about the security gaps that show up if we, if we don’t modernize it. So while, while print is not going anywhere, the infrastructure that manages it absolutely is, and that’s, that’s not being driven by print technology. That’s being driven by IT technology.
So number, number one, you, you mentioned cloud. Print has to move to cloud native. The infrastructure has to be cloud native. Devices, whether it’s my desktop or whether it’s the end printer have to be designed to be able to integrate well with the cloud and operate that way efficiently, securely, and seamlessly and reliably.
The second is integration. People don’t want standalone systems. They don’t want a standalone print management system that tracks users differently, that tracks behavior differently, that reports and, and collects data that’s, that’s siloed in… Today’s IT world is integrated, so a print platform has to integrate with other on-prem platforms.
Think, think about it this way. When your printer goes down, and still most organizations, the way they find out that they’ve got a printer problem is an end user calls I– the help desk which is absolutely nuts in today’s standard. There may be a system somewhere that knows that a printer is out of toner or needs a, a fuser replaced, or even just has a, has a paper jam.
That information needs to get to the people who are responsible for end user support and end user services. So breaking down these silos and integrating the systems and integrating the data is a key part of that. And, and we’ve touched on a, on a couple of the other items. One is print needs to be user-centric first, identity-centric.
We need to know who is printing, what they’re printing, why they’re printing, where they’re printing, so that that print process which used to start with just, can I touch the printer, meaning across the network can I touch it, and if I can, then I have access to who am I, and what printers do I have access to, and what do I have the rights to to print.
So user-centric, cloud native, integrated, and, and certainly the last piece of this, and you mentioned is zero trust, is it’s gotta be secure, encrypted end-to-end managed. And increasingly what we’re seeing is not just that the flow is managed, but what’s actually showing up on the page. Data loss prevention.
Brian, you- you’ve been inside of, of operations, and all of a sudden you start printing out financial documents. That’s a change in behavior. How do we know that that’s happening and, and predicting it? All of that we see as, as what’s emerging as print operations or what we call print ops, and that’s really where we see the, the, the future of this print going is is a modern cloud-based operational model.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Just to highlight some things here, and I think it’s interesting, at least for, in my career, at least the last 15 years, maybe even longer, we’ve talked about this paperless environment, which is crazy that I think we’ve shifted a little bit in that direction, but there’s still a lot of printing going on, and we certainly don’t see us limiting printing in the foreseeable future.
I think we’ve all just kind of given up on this paperless idea. But the h- thing I wanted to really highlight is you talked about we need to ensure that printing infrastructure is modernized, integrated, user-centric, cloud native, and secure, and I think those are really important points to hit on today for sure.
Kevin, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Kevin Pickhardt: Excellent. Thanks, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Kevin Pickhardt Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
