Post & Walters Ask Us Anything LVII: From Scanners to Cyborgs, This One Had It All

A live session that started with Twain and ended with android repair strategies. 

Just another Friday with Post Walters.

By Cole Jensen

It began like many other Fridays, with Greg Walters opening the doors to the always-chaotic, never-scripted stage of Post Walters: Ask Us Anything. On this particular episode, the fifty-seventh in the series, what began as a discussion about document scanning evolved into a far-reaching, fast-moving conversation about everything from humanoid robot maintenance networks to the failure of Ai sales webinars to actually teach anyone anything.

"Scan is the new black.” — Art Post

The first ripple in the current was TWAIN Direct. Art Post shared that the Print4Pay Hotel had officially partnered with the TWAIN Working Group to promote better education around embedding TWAIN Direct into multifunction printers. More than just tech buzz, this is a critical move for an industry waking up to the surge in cloud-based workflows. A few years ago, scan-to-cloud was a nice-to-have. Now, it is a competitive lever. And the reason it’s rising isn’t because salespeople pushed it. It’s because end-users are pulling it.

Kevin Neal joined to dig into that TWAIN/Keypoint Intelligence collaboration. Keypoint, with its long-standing connection to Buyers Lab, is giving the TWAIN ecosystem a needed layer of structure. They're now building a real certification framework that will score hardware and software based on adherence to the TWAIN Direct spec. Anyone who’s dealt with scanner drivers from multiple vendors knows why this matters. Too many manufacturers implement “TWAIN-like” systems that break down in the real world. The new certification path will create clarity and reliability. In short, it’s the kind of standardization this corner of the industry has always needed.

But this isn’t about legacy gear. Greg pointed out how the scanning opportunity is actually in places we aren’t looking. Art shared a recent sale where a law office chose a premium scan-to-OneDrive configuration without blinking. John D. Carlo emphasized that a Microsoft security update broke a lot of older OneDrive connectors. The fix isn’t free, but it is better. And clients are starting to choose better. Greg nailed it: if you’re not asking clients about their cloud ecosystem, you’re probably missing the one thing they’d pay extra for.

“If you’re not asking clients about their cloud ecosystem, you’re missing the one thing they’d pay extra for.” — Greg Walters

The conversation turned sharply when Kevin brought up a client site with sixteen USB-attached scanners, all managed manually by a third-party IT firm. Most resellers might sell the hardware and move on. Kevin sees an opportunity to overhaul the entire document architecture. TWAIN Direct or centralized control systems like NX Manager allow remote configuration, profile management, and even usage analytics. This is margin, hiding in plain sight. Dealers who understand how to transition from standalone chaos to cloud-connected simplicity are going to win service and consulting revenue with every device they touch.

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