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hello and thank you to everyone joining us for today's webinar i'm lindsay lam and i'm on the marketing team at pharos i am very excited to have our ceo kevin pickard as today's presenter kevin will be sharing the pharaoh's perspective on the long-term impact the pandemic could have on office printing and print infrastructure i got a preview of everything he's planning on sharing and you are in for a lovely treat so before kevin takes over i'd like to call your attention to the questions area within your go to webinar panel on your screen and while several of you submitted questions ahead of time during registration if any questions come to mind while kevin is speaking please type them into the questions area and we will spend some time at the end tackling those so kevin i'm going to turn my webcam off and the floor is yours excellent thank you uh thank you lindsay and lindsay knows uh knows me well enough to know that i never give the same presentation twice so whatever preview she got she'll get something different that's one thing i can promise that's that's a safe prediction for me uh so welcome everybody and uh and good afternoon uh i was reflecting as we as i was going in preparing for this presentation was one year ago this week as as a matter of fact i was giving our kickoff webinar for 2019. um and boy am i glad it wasn't a predictive future kind of a challenge uh back in 2019 because certainly as i sit here today in our nearly empty uh office that's uh designed to to fit a hundred um i can assure you that uh i was not predicting having my own collection of designer face masks that in the last 10 months i'd take one trip on a on an airplane that all of a sudden that there'd be a cultural shift of shaking somebody's hand would be considered taboo none of these would have been anywhere near my my top ten but this is where we are right we've uh we're emerging i believe um as we see the vaccines being given certainly in the u.s and and around the world i think we are uh on the other side of what has been a um the most unique and challenging year probably for any of us on this phone any of us listening in that we have ever had but even through this even through the pandemic even through all the change that we've had in this uh in this last year some things don't change and one of those as i look at it uh is the definition of health uh at pharaoh's as we look at the definition of health whether we're talking about an individual a society a business uh team however we look at it our definition of health is focused on resilience resilience defined as our ability as individuals or as organizations to respond to the healthiest way possible to whatever life sends our way so no matter what we predict uh whether we're predicting life to change by a little or by a lot this is the primary focus that we have our ability to respond to the healthiest in the healthiest way possible to whatever life sends our way um in 2021. so um with that uh let's take a look at 2020 and the experience that we've had and the question that keeps coming up in uh in my mind and and up again and again at pharaohs and with some of our clients and that is um so now what health is defined as our ability to respond healthy action is then fueled by our ability to predict our ability to understand what is in front of us uh we have to be able to predict as best we can even in an uncertain world so that we can take the most intelligent action that we can take and that is really the focus of uh of this webinar to talk a little bit about prediction but also it's about the nature of change and how we think about that and how we've been responding to change and i have generally found that that the best place to look for what the future uh holds is to start with uh to start with our past um change is defined as the the change from uh the movement from what was um to what will be uh and oftentimes what will be is um is uh directly or correlated and oftentimes uh tied to in almost like a magnetic way to what was uh and i think the the nature of that is um uh as you look at homeostasis what is it that gets us to um return to patterns of the past and whether we're talking about humans or systems of business systems economic markets uh organizational behavior nearly any practice that we're involved in absent some permanent impact homeostasis raids that is systems will autocorrect they will adjust and return to some form of a stable equilibrium if you talk to financial advisors as an example um they will often talk about um being very careful about watching short-term impacts on on financial markets that as long as your focus is on the long term and you're and you're not in some immediate need there are long-term trends that will have short-term uh shifts and shocks to the system return to those long-term trends they rely on this nature of of homeostasis that uh that systems will return and so i think that's one of the questions that that jumps out at me as we look at predicting where will we be and in particular where will we be as it relates to printing where will it be as it relates uh to work um and the best prediction starting off is that uh systems are going to fight change um the best prediction of tomorrow is uh is yesterday so fair enough as we're all sitting here to say yeah okay um but the experience we're going through today is anything but normal these are not small shocks that that we are uh we've undertaken in 2020 that are continuing into 2021. um there really is no parallel in our lifetime for uh what we have all been experiencing um this pandemic that created the shock in how we work and how we live is a big one and it is very likely to have longer-term impacts so how do we as business professionals think about it and in particular as you as we look at uh at this market of um print and printing and it's related infrastructure how do we think about it because surely we're not going back to uh the world as it was um simply pre-covered with with no change uh and i would say that's a safe assumption i don't think we are going to go back at least not in any kind of reasonable time frame to our world pre-covet so the question becomes what changes are we going to see when do they happen and how do they impact how we think about the market and i'll share with you my view and the pharaoh's view on that let me start with saying this is not just about prediction this is also about the nature of change um going from what was to what will be uh uh and at pharaoh's we study change we're in the business of change that's how we view our market that's how we view our service to our clients our clients engage with us because they are seeking change and we are a change agent alongside them so any predictions that we have of the future have to take into account human behavior and i'll tell you that the first two steps of any change uh whether it's a change that we seek or as we have found with this pandemic a change that's being thrust upon us uh there are two inevitable undeniable stages that all individuals go through and change um and those are number one denial and number two fear the first denial is our ability our or our nature to hold on to status quo uh our desire for no change to hold to what we know to our familiar so this is our nature of denial um the second stage is once we've gotten past that stage of denial or mostly past that stage of denial is then fear the uncertainty and the fear and the anger that shows up when we start focusing on all of the unknowns of what comes next what is going to lead us from this this world that we knew to this world that uh that we don't yet know um the time that we spend in these stages of denial and fear can either be short kind of instantaneous when we're looking at all of a sudden we we can't go to the restaurant that we were planning on going to for dinner on friday night um too much longer which is longer term changes related to market shifts business shifts losing uh losing jobs uh um and and so forth we can go back and forth in these uh in these denial and and fear stages we certainly went through this and i went through it just to give you a quick sense of of um uh one quick example of this just going back to uh where were we when uh when this all started back in march and i remember going through my head saying okay we're closing our office we have a we have a pandemic that's making our way through um we are concerned we're sending people home to stop and create social distance and i was fully prepared for uh for us to be shutting down the office for a matter of weeks and thinking about things like uh how much how much watering do i have to do with my plant so that it will survive the couple of weeks until i until i get back and moving from there pretty quickly to one month later or even six weeks later uh saying why the heck did we just sign a 10-year lease on this space which is largely now empty um especially when productivity and efficiency in business continues uh with people at their houses and in a completely distributed fashion boy we're never going back to the office so the the nature of these kind of whip saw events between the the anger the fear the anticipation as we go back and forth what it means is our ability to predict um the future should be considered suspect uh in the nature of these changes especially in uh in early change and if you look at some of the early change and i would say it's just to a large degree we're um we're still there some of the early predictions uh it was a matter of of no more than a couple of months uh into this uh pandemic that we heard customers and businesses and uh and the press and the consultants out there saying boy the future of the traditional office is dead um business is continuing as as per normal as as fully efficient so why are we spending all this money on on office space maybe there's a new way for us to work um so we should be embracing this the nature of this this change and shift um the core component of that um worker productivity might even have increased as a consequence of coving some of these meetings that we have and transportation back and forth and commuting and so forth our elimination of these impacts of business might mean that we're being more productive um than we were before uh and another one that uh that popped up pretty quickly and i saw just just again recently as as in the in the press education and the future of education has changed forever um there will be no going back in the world of education whether we're talking about individuals or groups or organizations we can hear inside of this the the back and forth of denying the change and uh and embracing change the the fear and um and a focus on assumptions of the change much of which is uh is emotionally uh laden so uh that doesn't mean that it's wrong i'm not suggesting that any of these are wrong what i am suggesting is we need to be suspect each of us who is looking at making decisions about changes that impact our organizations our teams the services that we provide we need to be suspect about those changes that we are are looking at in this window of time um and in particular because of uh one of my old favorite um writers and all the people who have read it it's i think this this book probably came out in the in the late 80s maybe even the early 90s and that is peter sengay on the on the fifth discipline but one of the one of the items that was that peter had had identified one of his laws of the fifth discipline law number seven to be exact was that cause and effect are not closely related in time and space um but we as humans no matter whether we say that or try to interpret it it's not how we think we expect immediate cause and effect um why do i why do i bring that up um because as we look at the impact of the pandemic and the immediate causes that we had inside of our our organizations uh my own itself at pharaoh's all employees were sent home um we prepared uh uh for disaster recovery and and uh and availability and we were prepared for people to to lose in office to lose one of our offices or both of our offices so our systems could continue we went into disaster recovery mode but somewhat surprisingly and pretty quickly we realized that we have not seen a significant drop in productivity we kept going back to our employees to say what else do you need how else can we serve what what's missing what's breaking what's breaking in the way we serve our clients um and somewhat surprisingly we kept seeing not much not not not much is changing we're adapting we're resilient we're adapting these changes pretty quickly um so we're not seeing this uh this change in uh in productivity so therefore we pretty we get pretty quickly to therefore offices are overrated um cause effect uh without taking into account that cause and effect are awful often not closely related in time and space um as time went on and we look at what's happening in this uh this market today uh recent survey of um of corporate executive ser survey from uh enable is looking at tell us now how you're viewing what's happening in this uh in this market that we're all operating in um and the results were striking we're used to seeing a common commonality or agreement in the 50 60 percent range um but inside of this survey eighty-four percent of those surveyed were concerned about managers ability to manage remotely um over time eighty-one percent were concerned about declining morale and i can tell you it's been a concern uh here at pharaohs and one that i've heard echoed with our partners and our customers 76 percent concerned that we were getting a false read on productivity go back to law number seven from uh from peter sengi um that over time is when we see the impacts not immediately but over time we begin to see the impacts on on productivity um 75 concerned about home and life distractions and i think that not just on the uh the impact on work but the impact of our employees 74 percent concerned about lack of visibility inside the organization between employees and between supervisors and employees as well as from employees to employees in groups to group so pretty clear that corporate executives were beginning to recognize we've got growing concerns around the the longer term impacts of of what we're seeing in this covet environment but it's not just the supervisors that are saying that um 51 of employees um have expressed concern for work-life balance and the impact that uh that working from home and this this um uber mobility that we'll we'll talk about has had on them as individuals um and on their families so so i think as time goes on we begin to get a clearer picture of of uh where we are and it's a good reason for us to hold loosely to our predictions of of what's going to be in as we move forward fundamentally i think part of this is because uh as we look at covet 19. um covet 19 is not an evolution evolutionary business change darwin is not at play here um it's not like we all got together and said we're going to send everybody home and see if that's a a better answer it is a systemic shock that the pandemic has has brought to us taking a step back we worked the way we did with the interactions the way they were using the tools the way we did in the offices the way we did for a reason absent some compelling and more permanent force that will create a long-term systemic change my belief is we will return to a reality that is going to be much closer to 2019 than has currently been predicted by most of the articles that um uh that i read um true data points uh continue to uh support that when we look at in asia let's get very specific about this printing space when we looked in asia at markets and businesses that began to open up and we started sending employees back to the the office after an extended closure what we saw was that pretty quickly within a matter of a couple of weeks their relationship with their tools their relationship with print and printing went back to 90 plus of what it was pre-code so it's safe to assume that there are data points which would suggest that uh habits will return this is not to say that there is no impact and we're not going to see a long-term impact change absolutely does happen and shocks in our system make change happen faster one of my favorite quotes uh is from bill gates um looking at predict prediction uh and he is his observation was that we always overestimate the amount of change that's going to occur in the next two years and we underestimate the amount of change that's going to occur in the next 10. and i love this quote because it seems to ring so true our ability to predict uh and over predict what's going to happen immediately in front of us seems to get proven time and time again even when we try to keep this in mind true change takes time but it absolutely happens so my view is that this pandemic that we are going through and the business impacts of the pandemic are having the effect of speeding this time in many ways they are taking this 10 years and saying this 10 years is going to be compressed but i don't think it's changing the nature of our overestimating what we think the impact is going to be in the uh in the near term so i want to address what are what are these forces that may be impacting the uh the nature and the speed of change that that i think we're seeing inside of the pandemic that are driving how we at pharaohs are looking at the market and how and how we're looking to serve um and i want to take a look at the at the macro the macro forces inside of this and i don't want to just i want to distinguish this from the from the micro forces um that are going on um importantly because the micro forces are the ones that tend to hit home and they hit home very personally but there's no doubt that um that the amount of change and these micro impacts might grow not in um in scope but in scale um that impact each of us whether we're talking about um business closures uh family challenges uh job losses and and layoffs uh health uh even life and death these these are very real impacts they're personal uh and most unfortunately there uh many of them can be at least long-term if uh if not permanent so uh the focus here is not so much on those on those impacts as it is more on the systemic impacts at the uh at the business level at the global level what can we predict as we're looking at how we serve um our business clients and for those of us in this in this print space how we serve our end users and how we serve our businesses that depend on this so our focus is more narrowly on these macro forces and so what what are they number one is learning when we see this kind of a shock it forces us all to have different experiences and those new experiences accelerate learning um that accelerated learning means that uh that that we are going to impact how we see the world how we view the world and therefore our actions on a on a faster basis we see new problems that emerge in the market uh so new innovation is driven out of the sense of this this new market new problems new challenges um we create new habits uh certainly uh just how we work uh how we interact is is uh we'll talk about that in in a little bit but uh new habits are are are created out of uh force um wealth has shifted from business to business sector to sector group to group country to country uh and those wealth impacts whether we're talking about wealth as a as a form of of uh actual cash you know or whether we're talking about it in terms of customer shifts market shifts decision shifts um that has long-term impacts on the on the business and then over time you're looking at value systems and and uh and cultural change these are the types of macro forces that will impact how we think about how we operate uh going forward in the market and i want to address a a couple of these so experience and this is one that um that we all went through and had early conversations especially with some of our enterprise customers um uber mobility mobility was not created as a consequence of this uh of this pandemic but boy was it accelerated right the idea that people were working remotely that that we all wanted to be able to access assets remotely to be able to connect to our corporate networks remotely um this was this long predated the um the pandemic uh the idea that in a matter of uh of weeks um organizations of tens of thousands of of uh users or employees or hundreds of thousands of employees were going to find themselves with every single employee remote created this massive learning of how do we learn to support this organizations were designed to support growth or expansion of mobility of 20 30 but but growing mobility of a thousand percent as 10x the number of people are trying to connect to assets and operate remotely and uh use vpn connections and uh and and so forth uh it's just a massive amount of learning and learning that we had to tackle uh quickly it really accelerated this this number two uh we've been talking with leading firms and this was part of my discussion with my presentation a year ago was talking about the the forecasts of the elimination of the corporate network and how some of the earliest uh customers earliest market leaders the innovators were beginning to create organizations without without a corporate network designing that there was not going to be firewalls the organization and all of their employees would be on the open wild west of the of the corporate network we went from having just innovators there to lagging organizations being forced to adopt that model um immediately so um so that experience shifted the rate of adoption uh in the market security and the security impact of both of those um massive challenges for uh organizations looking at what that means for uh for their clients and and for their organizations the distribution of corporate assets um organizations sending tens of thousands uh or thousands of just narrowly from our perspective thousands of printers being sent home for home use we had gone through with these organizations of ripping out all of these private devices personal devices from a security standpoint from a cost standpoint from a tracking and management all of a sudden we find ourselves flipping that on its ear and sending out thousands or tens of thousands of new printer devices and and other devices required at home to support people so this mass distribution of corporate assets the acceleration of iot because all of these are now being connected directly to the internet um no longer to some corporate network all driving this necessity for infrastructure as a service and how we're supporting infrastructure as a service so there's real ripping the band-aid off of some of these uh some of these changes that people have been planning out for these are changes that we're planning for um five years hence 10 years hence and all of a sudden the band-aid is ripped off so those are creating what these are going to create these experiences um permanent or long-term change they also created acceleration of of innovation one that we had almost immediately zero touch um it was not even in our mind that we were going to have to start looking at how do we enable our customers to do what they need to do without allow without forcing someone to even touch the the user interface of a printer um without even having to log in how do we create a zero touch experience uh and and do it quickly not just us but uh but but many others um zero trust zero trust to the the idea that um that the um the wall and moat model of um of traditional security was going to go away once everybody is already outside and on the network um zero trust became no longer something that we might migrate to it became a reality in a reality quickly and you look at things like the solar winds cyber attack not that long ago that cyber attack another demonstration of the need to embrace new ways of thinking about security and embracing zero trust inside of that zero infrastructure it's very hard to start looking at how do i use a corporate infrastructure when people are outside of that outside of that infrastructure which then drives the need for cloud-ready native cloud-native technologies some of that being driven because people are remote some of that being driven by the nature and change of the organization itself companies like amazon hiring 400 000 people that requires a new offices new space and we don't have the time to create the kinds of infrastructure investments we would in the past so um so embracing zero infrastructure and infrastructure as a service and then the elements inside of this how do i track manage all of this uh all of this remote assets how do i know what's happening at these printer devices uh to speak very close to home of what's happening in our corporate uh with these corporate assets as we look at them remotely so these technologies and embracing these technologies are driving what we see to be both short-term and long-term acceleration of shifts also new habits the acceptance of video conferencing what we're doing here the trust that is uh showing up among remote workers in remote working um the acceptance of that is really no longer even a question of whether it's something that's accepted when it's the only way that uh that we operate micro meetings micro events popping up all uh all over the place i just reading an article um last weekend about micro weddings um and businesses that are being started to create micro weddings and they're being started because people believe these micro weddings and micro gatherings are going to take place um even after we uh we look at covet changing the way we think about how we get together and how and and operate and then the concept of the always-on work day right um habits that we're picking up as individuals that if there is no distinction between going to work and coming home um and not all of these are welcome um in fact many of them are absolutely not welcome as humans we tend to be stubborn and fickle we will return to old habits about as quickly as we bring on new ones if if not faster what what has over time become this nature of lack of connection and connectivity is creating this and fueling this desire for people to return to community job loss and turnover these are not considered improvements to organizations nor are they considered improvements for for individuals and the impact on individuals our reliance on how we learn engage with each other the teaching that we have inside of organizations and supporting each other from whether we're talking about i.t or or new employees onboarding people all of these all of these are are forces that are not easily replaced and yet their needs their habits that we have of how we work together um my personal belief is that these old habits that we have of gathering in community working in community working in collaboration um engaging with each other and i'll add print to that list my belief is they will return and they'll return probably as easily as as they've been taken i was talking about uh amazon and this wealth shift amazon hired 427 000 employees in 10 months that's just astronomical that number of employees and that amount of shift and change that's been going on inside of of amazon when we look at our space this printing space and what's happening in the printer market a whole flip side of this we we have a market that that has been hit hard by the closing of the offices if you look at the printer oems the forecast for full year 2020 is that operating profits will be down 61 percent um versus 2019 um due to uh due to covet and office changes these are huge huge unprecedented shifts they create this uh volatility and uncertainty that's not going to go away quickly that is the new norm we're going to expect volatility and and uncertainty even as we begin to emerge it's created as focus on deferring expenses where possible and we've certainly seen that with our customers and organizations that are deferring bringing in new devices because there's uncertainty not just because their offices are closed but because we don't know it's hard to predict what's coming next um but then also supporting rapid expansion um where needed and that also is um is driving people to make decisions that are that are shorter term in nature customers seeking a new level of flexibility we're seeing organizations that used to go into purchase uh asset and purchase fleets of devices who are now looking at uh managed print contracts where they're asking for 20 25 flexibility and the number of printers and print assets that they're going to have under contract from one year to the next creates a whole different both opportunity and challenge for organizations who are looking at how do i support this how do i support that level of flexibility from our standpoint we've seen a massive growth in people looking at software as a service the as a service model um is becoming the contracting norm just because we don't know we don't know where this uh where this shift is going um so we're seeing these macro impacts and uh and and what it's having on the impacts that it's having on the market so let me talk a little bit about how how ferrous is responding what are we what are we doing and how are we seeing this uh moving forward and then then we'll kind of begin to wrap this up and and move to uh some questions um so number one is um we're continuing to hear from our customers that printing remains a dial tone service so uh some of you may have seen this slide from a from a uh a presentation i did a while back i forget it it's worth pulling back out an old favorite of mine um 2001 a space odyssey and when you look at what's happening uh up on the moon stanley kubrick as he was uh developing this one of the one of the greatest futurists of his time um even when you look at stanley kubrick up on the up on the uh the moon um our relationship with printing and with and with paper has been is so tight um that without even really thinking uh he's got printing happening on the moon they're handing around color documents back and forth in a a moon rover it's a way of of working for us that has been around for so long that it is a habit and it is something that we are not going to see go away uh quickly so printing remaining a dial tone service is something that we continue to um to expect um it's not so much the printing that we see that is going to be changing in this in this uh near term although we do see a tremendous amount of of volatility in that space um it's the it's the way that printing is delivered this is where we see the biggest shifts happening like the stock market i my belief is that printing will will return to its um its old kind of trend albeit maybe uh maybe a little bit uh accelerated we've seen a long-term trend of one to two percent of uh printed printing decline year over year i believe that the the covet pandemic is going to accelerate that i don't believe it's going to accelerate at the 20 percent 30 percent um even 10 i believe that what we're going to see is um and what we're seeing for those organizations that have begun to return to the office and those um those countries that have begun to see this is that volumes will return to 85 90 maybe even a little bit more than that of their pre-coveted levels by year end 2022 we will see offices beginning to open as we get to the middle of this year we're still going to see right straight through the summer businesses with offices closed education impacted we're not going to see a quick return but as we begin to get into the fall and offices begin to open and then as we start getting into 2022 is where i think we'll see the biggest impact of these uh of these changes what we will see is that how printing is delivered is going to change and that is going to be based on uh based on these trends of of security and uber mobility and flexibility and uncertainty that we're seeing inside of this uh this market so where's our focus at pharos number one is we have an accelerated focus on printing infrastructure as a service one year ago that was the presentation that uh that i gave here um as somewhat predictive of what we were seeing in the market in 2020 we saw nearly a doubling of our customers who have embraced infrastructure as a service and software as a service in 2020 so through the covet period accelerated growth in this space and embracing it it did not all come with new printers new printer growth it came as infrastructure changes that people had to put in place um that was the prime driver of what we're what we're seeing in this space so we saw rapid growth in this in 2020 it currently dominates nearly all the conversations that we're having with with customers going forward we expect to see that continue focus on zero whether we're talking about zero touch i think that is going to continue even as we begin to go back to uh back to to offices even as we begin to emerge from the from the pandemic i do believe that um people using masks um people being careful about uh about what we touch where we touch and how we interact with each other will continue for quite some time so i think zero touch will be a focus um clearly zero infrastructure um the internet of things native cloud technologies partly based on mobility but al also partly based on organizations that are just continuing to focus on what is what is their core and the core for most organizations is not managing a print infrastructure so they do not want to manage a print infrastructure if they can find others who will do that infrastructure as a service they will and clearly the continued shift to um to zero trust uh also driven by this this ongoing embracing of zero corporate network or the hi the world of the hybrid network where employees and corporate assets are outside of what we would consider the the traditional corporate network once that once uh that that pandora's box is open i don't see people going back to um the way we were managing it assets uh prior trying to control them and control information inside the firewall it's it's out and i don't see that changing quickly the other element inside of this and you'll hear about this in coming webinars from us is the this nature goes along with printing infrastructure as a service and that's direct printing infrastructure as a service the idea that that printing printing as we know it i hit file print it comes out on a printer enabling that flow enabling that process in a truly zero infrastructure uh secure zero trust model for organizations whether you're in an in a corporate infrastructure or across corporate infrastructures this idea of eliminating the printer infrastructure but still allowing all printing devices that exist today and all users to to enable printing is something we have heard a a rapid increase in demand and it's something you'll be hearing about us shortly watch this space as we as we introduce that um accelerated going into 2021 uh it was something that we had on our roadmap that we've pulled forward pretty pretty dramatically because of what we're hearing in the marketplace and inside of this is mobility whether we're looking at at google print ios android concepts of known network all of this needs to be embraced because as i mentioned before we don't see that going back into the box so this is where we are focused um not so much on the nature of printing changes it's the nature of the infrastructure how we operate how we communicate its impact on security investment is where we see this uh this changing but the other thing that i will say is is uh we're always listening we listen to our customers we listen to our partners we listen to markets be beyond ours to understand and read because whatever we predict we know it will not be exact so the definition of health does not change it's our ability to be resilient our ability to respond to whatever life sends our way what i can tell you is that all of our all of our customers all of our partners um continue to talk about and see printing as a dial tone service not strategic but absolutely necessary um covet has absolutely impacted print volume there's no question about that there's no and and that impact is going to continue for some period of time even as we see it return in late 2021 and into 2022 um that that impact will continue to fluctuate and we'll see it in different markets um but as office is open as we adapt and become flexible and make our way back to uh how we worked in the old world i i do expect that printing largely is going to come back to um to where it was if not to where it was in 2019 it will be close we continue to see our job as as uh as unchanged in this our job is to listen to work with our partners to work with our customers to continue to make that printing environment what it should be simple secure and infinitely flexible none of those have changed the hows the whys how quickly uh inside of that is is where we are seeing um much of that change so uh with that um i've been talking quickly and talking long i'm going to take a uh i'm going to take this point to turn this back over to lindsay and then we'll jump into uh questions and answers there were some submitted ahead of time uh as people were signing up and and we'll look at those that were submitted if you haven't submitted feel free to uh to do so um lindsay perfect thank you kevin um so yeah we did have a couple of questions come in so i'll share those um but before i do that i did want to mention that we will be sending a follow-up email to everyone with the recording of today's event so you want to look out for that message and we also have several additional events in the works so those can be on topics like direct printing true cloud chrome os printing touchless print and more so you'll want to stay tuned as we begin to add those to our event calendar so thanks lindsay i will i will answer the first uh the first question that came up um from from uh our our friends catching uh catching me in the typo there um iot and uh with the capital o versus the uh capital i uh yeah iot is in his internet of things um i've been typing ios to too long so thanks for catching that uh that typo uh i will touch on that though because i think the internet of things um and the reason i bring that up is increasingly the this market even before we started has looked at printers and said we believe printers are um should be playing as a nice client in the internet of things they should be cloud native they should be able to be act accessed installed managed accessed as a true secure cloud client in and of themselves so we'll talk about it as both cloud native printing um as a um concept as the as the internet of things but uh thanks thanks for that um the uh the catch on the typo so sorry lindsey go ahead so one of the questions we had come in was that we'd love to learn more about your plans for chrome os integrations excellent great great question and that's another one that another item that uh popped into our focus in 2020 um as as google announced the uh the that they were going to be end of lifeing uh uh google print pharos has been working directly uh with google we have uh and do embrace chrome os and and uh chrome os printing across our entire product suite whether we're talking about our cloud products or our on-premise products and just recently alongside google ferrous was uh was identified and recognized as an enterprise-ready google partner in in doing that so we view we view chrome os as one of those kind of uber mobility uh applications or environments that um that we also see growing as we look at at the impacts of covet all right another one we had is when everyone's at home and the printers are at work are folks supporting personal printers in any capacity if is there something else we can do with this print infrastructure or do we just turn it off yeah yeah yeah good good then another good question and um and yeah that's that is something that we've um we've adjusted to as we've as we've looked at 2020. um we have large-scale enterprises hundreds of thousands of uh of people who were forced to move home and move home quickly um and start working from home uh so many organizations that had paper required processes found themselves buying local or or printers for at-home use and as they did so uh very quickly moved into the we we want to send these devices home but we also want to make sure that they're secure we want to make sure that we can monitor them um we want to make sure that our employees can easily print to these uh to these devices and our our products from a data analytics standpoint have long monitored local devices whether they're at home or whether they're uh or whether they're inside of a corporate network but now increasingly we've been looking at talking about the infrastructure to deliver direct printing um just to explain a little bit more about what that means um many people who look at pharaohs and uh and those in our space think about us as this concept of pull printing or secure printing securing all the printers badging in authenticating at a print device to then release my my print file that is a that is a a big portion of what we do but as we start looking at infrastructure not all printing is done that way a large amount of printing is not badge released home printing being one of them so organizations looking at how do i use an infrastructure that enable how do i use your cloud or zero infrastructure technologies and capabilities simple abilities to print directly to the printer so that's another one that we've seen at home no print driver management we want to use the same print driver same print process monitored managed whether i'm printing at home or whether i'm printing directly at work or whether i'm printing through um through a secure or or pull print queue so um so yeah we we are seeing that need for at home monitoring as well as infrastructure perfect kevin i know you just you were just talking to direct print and we had a question come in that said we heard about direct print from pharaoh's can you talk about that a bit was there anything else you want to add on that topic before i ask another question no i the only thing i would add on that uh lindsay is that we've we see the uh the the market and the desi the where pharaohs is is playing shifting over time from um just print management like what we're talking about here as um secure printing or pull printing or um or data analytics to an i.t infrastructure service it's a different problem that we're solving but it's organizations that are embracing infrastructure moving into the cloud and or zero trust infrastructures are realizing they have a printing problem so those organizations that are looking to migrate infrastructure to infrastructure as a service need direct printing file print it comes out i don't want to wait just like they need secure printing print walk up to a device anywhere on the network and release it so as we shift to an infrastructure services company in addition to what we do for direct printing that infrastructure needs to be able to handle those types of printing workflows just as easily across that same secure infrastructure so that's that's what we mean when we talk about direct print perfect thank you so another question is does ferro support contactless printing or app-based printing where users can authenticate via an app on the printer hardware and collect their print and they're also asking if we support canon printer hardware so i'll answer the second part yes absolutely we support canon hardware we've been a longtime canon partner um uh support all the major uh oems we are multi-vendor um uh and then i'll cycle back to the contactless uh we talked about touchless zero touch um what we have found is that the majority of our clients um the the vast majority of the print experience when people walk up to our um printers and print and controlled devices is i authenticate usually through a a badge but i'll authenticate could be a mobile phone could be a proximity badge um and the vast majority of the time it's print all swipe print all there are times where people want to delete or change the finishing options of what it is that they've printed or print and save but the majority of the time it's print off so what we were able to do very quickly is to say um if the majority of the time it's print all then why don't we change all of our optionally for those organizations that want to move to this uh this form as soon as i badge in the immediate new experience in in zero touch or contactless is the screen comes up and says unless you stop me i'm going to print all um and we'll give people about five seconds to uh to interrupt the process if they need to go in and change options and operate off the panel then they need to do that but the majority of the time they don't so that was something that we've uh we implemented and we were able to implement on our cloud portfolio in a matter of in a matter of weeks and have it in production but it does work across all of our product line okay another one and we have a couple of minutes left here can you share more about measuring and managing virtual worker print uh yeah so um so i guess if we if we're talking about uh virtual workers then i'm guessing what we're talking about is is predominantly uh remote uh remote workers or uh we may be talking about virtual desktop we do work with virtual desktop and vdi environment um if we're talking about remote working we talked about that a a while back um from our standpoint one of the foundations of the founding of pharaohs is the premise that that it's not printers that print it's people that print so we fundamentally view our business our technology our monitoring and our integration our interactions at the user level so whether we're talking about virtual environments remote workers local workers home workers our focus is first first and foremost on the user in addition to what we do on the printing okay we have two more that came in so i think we we have time to cover those before we let everybody go um so one is can you print from google chromebooks yes yep and then another one that came in is we've been watching the manufacturer market consolidate over the past few years with some acceleration moving into the pandemic as we move out of the pandemic what are your thoughts on industry consolidation given the increased revenue pressure in lower volumes which vendors will be well positioned to move forward and which vendors will be more susceptible to failure or acquisition yeah good uh very very good question you're probably not going to like my answer i do believe there will be continued consolidation i think that just makes sense when we look at the industry one of the things i was going to say right at the beginning is before before buying into any of my predictions if you if you uh if you were to monitor my stock performance on average at best so trying to predict which of those vendors is going to purse is going to pursue and and and win at the end of the day um that's that's a that's a tougher one and since we partnered with all of them i really don't want to necessarily go and speculate in that in that space um what i what i will say is i think you've got a couple of forces that are going on inside of this um you do have declining markets whether whether you look at the pandemic or not we've got declining markets and you've got a proliferation of vendors so that tends to lean towards there's going to be consolidation in the industry the second piece is i think every single one of them is getting hurt on their balance sheet as we make our way through covet so that's going to create a challenge for um for consolidation on the one hand there may be some perceived bargains out there if printing is going to go back to 85 to 90 percent the market might over correct and and uh and there may be some bargain purchases for organizations deciding to decide they're going to combine but the flip side is i think balance sheets are going to be they're going to be struggling coming out of this but um if i had to predict i would say yes we'll see some some continued consolidation over the years how fast and who is a different discussion perfect thank you kevin um so we have one minute left um so i'm just gonna close up here we do have a couple remaining questions so we will make sure to um in our follow-up message answer those and so just a special thank you to everyone who joined us today and to you kevin for all of the insight related to the pandemic and the world of print like i mentioned earlier we will be following up with everyone with a link to the recording of today's webinar and if you have questions or comments about what you heard today please don't hesitate to reply to the follow-up email or reach out to anyone at pharos and we will help get you the answers you need so we hope you all enjoy the rest of your day and please stay healthy and safe thank you thanks lindsey thank you everybody you