Daryl Davis · Vice President Sales · Innovaic

Printers don’t suffer from a lack of software. In many cases, they have too much of it — MIS, web-to-print, prepress, imposition, production systems, accounting and increasingly AI. The challenge is getting all of those systems to actually work together.

At PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas, Wayne Beckett meets Daryl Davis, CTO & VP Operations at Innovaic, to talk about connecting the increasingly complex software environment inside a modern printing company.

Daryl describes Innovaic as the glue between systems. Rather than immediately replacing the investments a PSP has already made, the objective is to connect them, make information flow between them and create one environment where jobs and business data can be managed across the complete production process.

That can include everything from web-to-print and MIS through preflight, imposition and production, while feeding information back from the factory about capacity, actual production performance, costs and inventory.

And that doesn’t necessarily stop with modern equipment. Where presses and production systems can provide data through APIs, Innovaic can use those connections directly. Older equipment without that capability can still be brought into the data environment through additional shop-floor data collection.

For Daryl, this foundation becomes particularly important as the industry starts talking seriously about AI.

AI needs context. If job, customer, production and business information remains fragmented across disconnected systems, there is only so much intelligence AI can provide. Get the “boring stuff” right first — clean data, connected systems and reliable workflows — and AI suddenly has something useful to work with.

There is another advantage: scalability.

Much of the knowledge inside a printing company still exists in the heads of experienced employees. That’s difficult to reproduce when a company grows, opens another facility or loses key people. A connected business system can help capture more of that knowledge in processes and automation rather than depending entirely on individuals.

Until we figure out how to clone experienced print people, software may be the next best option.

Watch Wayne Beckett’s conversation with Daryl Davis from Innovaic at PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas.