Just Tech CEO Josh Justice On The Xerox-Lexmark Deal, SMB Cloud Migration, And Opportunities In 2025
‘As soon as I heard about it, I smiled, because this is about strengthening their core print business. I signed into the investors call, and I watched the presentation, and there were many benefits of the acquisition,' Just Tech CEO Josh Justice tells CRN about Xerox’s latest big deal.
Xerox’s $1.5 billion acquisition of Lexmark will consolidate two of the larger print and copy makers in the world under one roof and it opens the door for exclusive Xerox dealers to grab a bigger piece of the print market, Just Tech CEO Josh Justice told CRN.
“I've had conversations with customers, with other partners and with employees, and I tell them all the same thing: this is two American companies coming together, and we're gaining manufacturing capabilities in North America,” he told CRN. “And every person I tell that to there's a smile on their face. I think this is really good news.”
The La Plata, Md.-based Just Tech is a strategic Xerox partner and one of the top 10 Xerox partners in the country. It was the first Xerox-certified personalized application builder authorized developer.
[RELATED: Xerox To Buy Lexmark For $1.5B In Blockbuster Print Deal]
Justice said while Just Tech has always been a mono-branded Xerox dealer, Just Tech’s IT service revenue has been growing rapidly in recent years by focusing on the SMB markets migration to the cloud and demand for cloud orchestration solutions.
“Our IT service revenue for Just Tech now makes up a third of our monthly recurring revenues, and we found that IT services are a great complement to print services,” he said. “Studies show that clients would rather work with one partner for both.”
Xerox CEO Steven Bandrowczak announced Xerox’s agreement to buy Lexmark last month, telling analysts that the deal improves its core print business, and increases revenue from growing print markets that give the combined company reach.
“The combination of our companies establishes a stronger, more stable presence in the evolving print and managed print services industry and enhances Xerox's portfolio, offering a more balanced and competitive range of print solutions, with increased presence in growing print market segments,” he told investors.
While Xerox board signed off on the acquisition, Lexmark-owner Ninestar’s shareholders must also agree in order for the deal to close. The acquisition is also subject to regulatory approvals. It is expected to close in the second half of 2025
The merger of Xerox and Lexmark is a boon to SMB businesses, which rely on the steady appliances to deliver business outcomes, Justice said. He said two of his best quarters ever for printer revenue arrived in 2024 and he is looking forward to the year ahead.
“As soon as I heard about it, I smiled, because this is about strengthening their core print business,” Justice said. “I signed into the investor call, and I watched the presentation, and there were many benefits of the acquisition, and they showed them, including the additional manufacturing capabilities.”
According to market research firm IDC, the global hardcopy peripherals market which includes copiers and printers rebounded, growing 3.8 percent in terms of the number of devices shipped in the most recent tracking. The rebound happened even as the U.S. market dropped 2 percent and device shipments in China fell by 8.8 percent.
Here is CRN’s conversation with Justice, edited for length and clarity.
You were saying you expect this to be a great year for Just Tech, and the SMB community in general. Are you seeing that with your customers already?
We are. We had a great first week of the year in terms of order activity. And the first week of the year is usually slow. And that came after, you know, we had a lot of snow in this area.
So I was pleased by that. Orders were up the first week of the year. New opportunities seemed to be up. All of our clients seem to be feeling pretty good. You know, ever since 2021, our print volumes have stabilized.
So our print volumes have stabilized what they were before. Two months in 2024 were all-time high months in terms of average prints per device.
So we’re still seeing a lot of clients print.
Another big part of our business is IT services. And we've continued to grow with our IT services, adding more clients.
Now the big thing is moving small to medium businesses to the cloud, which, up until three or four years ago, they were more resistant. It was more enterprise clients going to the cloud. But now it's about bringing small to medium businesses to the cloud too, and it's also about performant workloads on the public and private cloud, because there’s not like one cloud fits all.
It’s like a mixture of clouds. We call that cloud orchestration, and we have a full-time cloud migration specialist at Just Tech, and that’s what they do every day.
Is that opportunity just in SMB there, when you're talking about cloud migration?
So we see the biggest opportunity in the small to medium businesses, because those aren't the ones who have traditionally adopted cloud-type environments.
Also small to medium businesses don't always have the IT people on staff to help make it necessary. So they need a little bit more help from an IT provider. And we offer these services as a managed IT provider to a client or as supplemental services to their IT department.
If it's a small to medium business of 100 people, and they have two IT people, they don't have the people to put the time to bring them to the cloud. They need more help so we can come in and work with them.
Can you talk about some of the challenges that the SMB faces when it comes to implementing cloud deployments?
I think for a longtime clients were just overwhelmed. I mean just completely overwhelmed with the move to the cloud. I think the solutions that are available now with Office 365, with OneDrive, with Intune, with VMware, I think they're more scalable than they've ever been. It's also easier, as an IT provider, to explain it to a client and to help them visualize the journey and how it's seamless.
We have processes in place now where one day you're going to be on an on-prem server, and the next day you’re going to be in the cloud.
Before they would say "but this program works on VMware." Or “this works on Intune," and now we say yes and it will. And with cloud orchestration, we'll tie it all together, and your users will not know the difference. And they're like, "Oh, that's a different way to think about it.”
I think people are overwhelmed thinking they needed to find one cloud solution for everything, and they couldn't. So that's why we tie different solutions together and make a singles form, and we're having a lot of success with that .
How are you looking at this acquisition as a longtime Xerox partner? I think you did not sell Lexmark before, right?
We're a mono-branded agent, mono-branded partner, so we only sell Xerox. And you know, it's in my best interest. Xerox makes smart moves and is a strong company. And I want Xerox to be strong.
If you look at their recent acquisitions, they've diversified, and they've also strengthened their corporate business. Their big acquisition, last year with ITsavvy was about diversification of revenues into IT services. That's similar to what we did in 2010 and that helped us with our revenues and stabilized our revenues.
Our IT service revenue for Just Tech now makes up a third of our monthly recurring revenues, and we found that IT services are a great complement to print services. Studies show that clients would rather work with one partner for both.
So I applaud Xerox for that, and that diversification.
The recent acquisition of Lexmark, as soon as I heard about it, I smiled, because this is about strengthening their core print business. I signed into the investor call, and I watched the presentation, and there were many benefits of the acquisition, and they showed them, including the additional manufacturing capabilities.
This is great that Xerox will be able to make their own stuff again, through Lexmark.
Lexmark says they have manufacturing in North America. That's incredible. They have manufacturing in Colorado and Mexico.
Lexmark already makes the A4 product line for Xerox, starting with the products we have now. They're fantastic. I don't get negative feedback, only positive feedback. The C415, the C625 are probably our biggest sellers. In the investor call, they said that the entry level Versalinks, when they're replaced, they will be Lexmark.
I think this is great. If the supply chain showed us anything, it's that the more in control you can be, the better. So I think this is great news. And then Lexmark also has other stuff, other software and other specialized software for healthcare and other things that hopefully then as channel partners we will have access to.
I think it's a smart move.
Does this give you kind of more firepower as an organization? More for your reps to work with? More levers to pull?
We all have IT decision makers who get attached to one model of printer. That's probably why they have Lexmark, because they love the Lexmark brand.
So, yes, absolutely. I think this will open more doors for us, allow us to -- as a mono-branded partner -- play in more opportunities. And also, as I said, a lot of clients that use Lexmark use it because there's a specialized software that Lexmark has, and I know they're big in the healthcare industry, so that would also be something for us to utilize to gain market share in.
Lexmark is an American company headquartered in Kentucky, but they sold to Chinese investors, like 10 years ago. And now Xerox is buying out the Chinese investors.
Does that make it a compelling case for customers?
I'll tell you I've had conversations with customers, with other partners and with employees, and I tell them all the same thing: this is two American companies coming together, and we're gaining manufacturing capabilities in North America. And every person I tell that to there's a smile on their face.
I think this is really good news. Again, really a lot of the acquisitions lately have been about diversification, but as a partner [with] a lot of my business [being] print related, yeah, it's great to see them make an acquisition that will strengthen their core business.
Where are you finding success with cloud orchestration? You hear a lot about what is happening with VMware as driving customers to the cloud, but what are you seeing out there in the SMB?
So when ransomware infiltrated our customers and shut down thousands of our managed devices for hundreds of clients, we worked 18 hours on, six hours off for 10-days straight to bring all of our clients back up. And they were up completely.
They started coming up immediately, but everybody was completely back up after 10 days, to a working format, and then we still had months of follow-ups to do.
But following that, Microsoft rereleased Autopilot. That can, if it's set up properly with Intune and OneDrive, you can script a PC layout so that, using Autopilot, you can wipe a PC, reinstall Windows, install all the programs, scripted, pull in the documents from OneDrive. Everything's ready to go in about 30 minutes to an hour.
Because of what we went through, and because cyber threats keep increasing, we decided that our new stack, what IT providers call their core services, was going to be around Windows, Intune, and Autopilot, and then we would script the other programs for the cloud around that.
So that is how we set all of our clients up with now. So if a device gets ransomware, they're not going to be down for days until we can, get out there. They're going to be up in an hour. So if you can reduce the impact of these cyberattacks, then they're not they're not going to cause as much damage.
We've been very successful with Windows Autopilot. It's also how we put out computers. Now, when someone has a new user, we send them a computer the first time they log in. It pulls in their script from Intune, sets the thing right up. I mean, it's beautiful.
Another solution that we brought out last year is something that was gaining traction in the marketplace was managed, detection and response. So as you know, when a cyberattack comes in, like ransomware, usually the most damage is not who it hits first. It's the five or six computers or the server it gets to later.
So with managed detection and response, and we use Blackpoint Cyber, if that computer becomes infected with anything, it shuts down all endpoints instantly. And we made that a core service in 2024 after we first built it in mid-2023.
That has been amazing. We have not had any client’s network go down for ransomware since we built that solution. We've had devices get locked down. It gets locked down. They call us, or we see it and we call them. We run Autopilot. That device is working in an hour. I mean, it's beautiful.
In the MSP space, do you find the tools are responding to the needs of the MSP? How relevant is the MSP tool space still for MSPs?
I think the tool set is more relevant now than it was in in 2021. I mean, we have tools now that, if we go through a cyberattack like we did before, we would have been through it in an hour, not, you know, 10 days of working around the clock and then months of follow up, right?
I think the tool set is much more relevant now for the threats that we face. You’re seeing an uptick in clients moving to the cloud because the tools are a lot more relevant. I wish we had these cloud and security tools 10 years ago, 15 years ago. I mean, the internet speed was there. We just didn't have the solutions yet.
How are you kind of looking at this moment right now with AI. Obviously you can't really escape the conversation, I'm sure, but how much are your customers asking about it?
I do see some of the things that AI is doing with help desk automation that I think that we could use, maybe more so on our print side. If someone calls for IT support, I don't know if they would be put off if they were talking to AI.
I saw some things with some vendors were doing with help desk support, with AI that I thought could help screen a lot of calls. Especially for print support. For example, if there's a smudge on a page or a line on a page, then there's probably a smudge on the glass and those are just common answers we give out on a regular basis.
So I could see where that could be helpful.
I'll tell you, I have not had one client ask me or my sales team about AI for their business. And most of our businesses are SMB. I'm sure it's different in the enterprise space, but as you know, we live in the SMB. They’re just not seeing it yet. If anything, I think most SMB users think AI is still scary.
It may happen like the cloud. I mean, they're just now getting on the cloud. So in five years, you and I'll be talking about how they're all embracing AI. It's just not there yet.
What are the closing thoughts here as you take off in 2025?
We're super excited for the year. And I saw a survey came out today that 60 percent of small business owners think that this will be the best year in the last five years. Like they're super excited about the state of small business.
We're geared up. We're excited for a strong 2025. We feel like we're in a good spot to have a great year. We've increased our marketing, videos, and advertisements. We're really excited. We want to generate as much opportunity as possible and have a great year.