Connected Workflows & The Future of Print: Fireside Chat with Tom Peire

Greg Young:
Good morning and welcome to the Infigo Software booth at Printing United 2025. And today I’m joined with my good friend Tom.

Tom Peire:
Hey, Greg.

Greg Young:
Tom and I think I don’t think we’ve actually met together other than on the trade show floor. Probably not. And we travel the world together a lot and we see each other at lots of events. And yeah, you can have a nice chat and see what’s going on in the world.

Tom Peire:
Exactly.

Greg Young:
So, Tom, what’s up?

Tom Peire:
My name is Tom Peire. I’m CEO at Four Pees, and I also have this fun title of being Chief Evangelist at Atomyx.

Greg Young:
Oh, Atomyx. Okay, so we’ll dive into Atomyx in a minute. But before we get there. So Four Pees and then Infigo have been working together the last few years. Yep. Tell me a bit more about how our partnership together came about and what it means for the world.

Tom Peire:
Well, what it means for the world, let’s be modest, is that we’re an implementation partner. In that sense, people need a product. People need technology. But without implementation, it doesn’t get you very far. And so we typically assist companies, print service providers, implement the technology that they buy, implement the products that they buy, and also connect it together because, also, let’s be honest, it does not live by itself. It needs to be connected these days.

Greg Young:
It’s quite an interesting one because obviously we’ve now got a few mutual customers and seeing how they continue to grow but also their needs and wants from that integration piece. And integration is a buzzword that has it’s not going away anytime soon. Everyone wants to have the automated dream and making sure that their print operations are running as efficiently as possible. So I’m going to lead. That is my transition into Atomyx, right? Tell me, what is Atomyx? How did that come about and why did you bring it to the world from what you’d seen at Four Pees?

Tom Peire:
Right. Atomyx essentially is an integration platform as a service. So it’s a cloud based platform that allows you to connect your entire technology stack together. As a print service provider, one of the things that we’ve seen, as we have a background in Pre-Press and Pre-Press automation, and there’s a lot of tools, a lot of products out there that will automate files moving through a workflow. However, the world is evolving. We’re moving more and more towards the cloud. There’s e-commerce. But there’s also CRM systems that are more and more cloud based. And so connecting these different systems and platforms together makes more and more sense to do that in the cloud as well.

Tom Peire:
As an integrator, what we are doing is typically bespoke work. So project based work. What we’ve seen through these projects is that more and more of what we do is recurring. And so connecting to different systems. Well, you kind of start seeing more and more of the same systems that need to be connected. So why do that over and over again?

Tom Peire:
One of the other things that we’re seeing is that while software vendors are very much focused on their tool, there’s a little bit of navel staring in there. They don’t live in that world where there’s only that tool that is being used. And so if you talk about Infigo, for instance, there might be print service providers that are not just using Infigo, but also other e-commerce systems, but that are also using other sources where orders are coming from. We see more and more the Gelatos of this world, the Cloudprinters of this world. And so the ability to funnel in orders from different order sources and get a unified view on that data on these orders is becoming increasingly important.

Greg Young:
And it’s something that we see in our world when we’re talking to PSPs and we’re trying to drive efficiency back to their business. Let’s say we’ve got reps that sit and take emails, orders via email and some from phone call and some from web to print and we keep having this same conversation about how do we have this centralized channel of orders. As you said, unified data is kind of the phrase here, isn’t it?

Tom Peire:
Yes. So when I say integration platform as a service, and that’s in all honesty the challenging bit, is that when you talk about data, data is boring and data is abstract. However, everybody agrees to the fact that data is essential. And so bringing that message across, how you connect to different data sources, how you transform that data into a unified view, is typically something that takes hours and hours, days and days of integration work. The fact that we’ve built that ability into a platform where it is easy to connect to a third party system where we have the tooling embedded in there to transform that data and to get a unified view on that, that is where the value of the platform is.

Greg Young:
And what does onboarding look like with Atomyx? What does it take for a customer to get up and running?

Tom Peire:
So we’re early stages at this moment. But the fact that we have a configuration user interface where we’re able to plug into these third party systems where there is UI where you can map data from one system to another. That already makes it significantly more low barrier. We are looking now into AI technology on how to make those translations even easier, so that you don’t have to be a programmer. You don’t have to be a data scientist to make those mappings.

Greg Young:
So obviously the industry itself evolved a lot. And we’ve seen that in our business the last few years in terms of digital transformation, as you mentioned, and that is starting to get more and more to the front of the queue. Every business seems to work out how they’re bringing that into the mix.

What do you see as the biggest shift that is shaping customers’ expectations and their rollouts at the moment?

Tom Peire:
Well, I think when you talk about digital transformation and when you talk about innovation, a lot of our industry has been focused on the capabilities of the printing devices. What is possible with the machines that we’ve got.

I think if you look at that, that is covered. The machines, the digital printing devices, digital and embellishment, all of that has been covered. And actually, if you make the analysis, at least from where I’m standing, that has not really provoked a big landslide in digital transformation. It has been just an evolution.

I think that what you’re seeing now is that on the demand side of things, things are changing. The platforms are really changing how demand is driven to the manufacturing capacity. And I think that business owners, print service providers, need to focus on how they are capable of capturing the demand. That is where the true shift is happening at this moment.

Greg Young:
It’s such a big challenge. It’s one that we have in our business where obviously multi-million dollar investments go into the actual print engine, the print device, and then the software is then a secondary piece to it.

And it’s how we all together, as a collective group, reiterate the importance of having connected systems so we can drive the volume. We can make the volume to your device more efficient, more automated, more profitable.

And that’s ultimately what they want: the profitability piece, right?

Tom Peire:
Yeah, it’s the profitability piece. But it’s also dealing with SLAs, dealing with how you return information back to the online ordering devices, back to the customer. The buying habits of customers have changed and their expectations on when they get information on where their order is have changed.

You see that the technology stack of many print service providers simply does not allow that because it is so disconnected. It is so disparate.

Greg Young:
So, if you could give one piece of advice to a PSP that’s looking to futureproof their business in the next 3 to 5 years, what would that be? What’s your crystal ball?

Tom Peire:
I go back to what I said earlier. I think it is about the data. It is about the connectivity, and it is about the implementation.

Now obviously the show has not been going on for a long time here, but what we see in North America is that people that come to see you at the booth, they are very much product-focused. And that’s great for you, for people like that individually. However, that also surpasses some of the real challenges that they need to focus on.

What I’ve been saying for a long time is that focusing on the implementation, and making sure that you do not just buy a product but look at the complete solution and how that is interconnected, is an absolute necessity.

Greg Young:
And I think there’s so many. I mean, we’ve still got customers, despite our continued drive to push automation, the amount of customers and prospects that we talk to still with siloed data sources is baffling.

Like in this day and age where everyone wants to start making data-led decisions as the prominent piece of how they drive their business forward, you’ve got data in so many different systems. There’s no connection. There’s no synergy between that data.

Tom Peire:
And that’s where you see that it is still very abstract to many of the business owners. They pick up the term data, data, data. But then if you say, oh, but now you have to put your money where your mouth is and you have to really make that data connected, all of a sudden it becomes a little bit too complicated.

Greg Young:
So we’ve said the word a few times now: automation. When people hear that word, what’s the biggest misconception that you come across that you’d love to clear up?

Tom Peire:
Well, and that also has been one of the recurring themes that I’ve tried to debunk. When you talk about automation in our industry, people talk about workflow.

When you talk about workflow, they say, we’ve got that. Because they’ve got something, typically in Pre-Press, that does Pre-Press automation.

However, if you look at what we’ve talked about before, if you really want to connect everything from order intake down to logistics and feed back the information, it is not just that pre-press workflow that is going to do that.

Automation is about significantly more than just that pre-press.

Greg Young:
Exactly. Web-to-print is only the beginning. You still need to get the files to print, get the logistics updates back, and push that back to the customer.

Tom Peire:
Yes. It’s bidirectional. It is not just about web to print. It is about feeding the information back to the customer as well.

Greg Young:
Are there any specific KPIs or metrics that you ask customers to track early to validate success?

Tom Peire:
Well, one of the things that we always ask as one of the first questions when a customer comes to us and says we want to talk about automation is:
How many orders do you process per day, and how many of those are new orders?

Because there are actually quite a few companies out there that want to think about automation but are not really ready for it.

Anything below 20 new orders per day is not really worthwhile looking into automation.
Unless they have strong seasonality and that goes up significantly during peak periods.

Greg Young:
What piece of advice would you give to a business owner that’s overwhelmed by digital transformation?

Tom Peire:
Thank you, Greg, come talk to us.

No, it really is that it is about getting assistance. Talk to somebody who can provide you guidance. Talk to somebody who can provide you assistance in looking at what your needs are.

We typically do analysis where we look at what the order flows are, what the different systems are, and how that can be optimized.
That is an investment over a couple of days of consultancy, but it prevents you from getting into systems that you’re not going to be happy with.

Greg Young:
How do you balance customer expectations when proposing automation? Because everyone wants that fully connected world on day one.

Tom Peire:
There is a difference between theory and reality.
With the analysis that I mentioned, we try to set the scene. But depending on the digital readiness of the customer, even that is challenging.

In an analysis, we may mention things that would be worthwhile investigating at some point, and they consider it already done.

So managing those expectations is one of the biggest challenges that we have in that path toward digital transformation.

Greg Young:
Final question. Sustainability is huge in Europe and growing worldwide. How does automation support greener initiatives?

Tom Peire:
I have to say that we’re not sustainability experts. Yes, sustainability is a buzzword.

If you look at how wastage is reduced, that is something that we can look at. If you have less errors, less reruns, that is less wastage.

We implement ganging and nesting tools where you try to optimize the media as much as possible.

And what we will be getting into more and more, as we’re gathering more data, is the traceability of where material is going and where it is coming back.