TL;DR
• At EUC World Amplify 2026, Nerdio's Scott Manchester argued that modernization is an operating model, not a milestone. Migrations never really finish.
• Print usually lives inside each desktop platform, so it gets rebuilt at every Citrix, Horizon, AVD or Windows 365 move.
• Microsoft's third-party printer driver changes (January 2026 through July 2027) make drivers baked into golden images a growing liability.
• The fix is an independent print layer: print policies, drivers, routing and reporting stay the same when the platform changes.
• Short on time? Jump to the five print questions to ask before your next migration wave.
Few people have shaped the modern virtual desktop more than Scott Manchester. He spent 25 years at Microsoft, leading the teams behind Remote Desktop Services, Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. He rose to vice president of Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, and in January he became Chief Product and Technology Officer at Nerdio.
At EUC World Amplify 2026 in Milwaukee, he opened the event with a keynote titled "The Great Cloud Migration: Why Modernizing Digital Workspaces Is an Operating Model, Not a Milestone." Two ideas stuck with me, paraphrased from my notes:
Both point to the same overlooked part of the stack: print. It rarely shows up in a migration plan. It always shows up when a migration goes wrong.
The metaphor lands because every EUC team has lived it. A few examples of what it looks like in practice:
• The Citrix renewal arrives mid-year. A bank moves its task workers to AVD before the renewal date, while traders and developers stay on Citrix for another year. Now there are two platforms in production, sharing the same users, sites and printers.
• Group Policy gives way to Intune. Security settings migrate cleanly. Printer mappings to traditional print servers from Group Policy Preferences have no native Intune equivalent (Intune natively deploys only Universal Print printers), so they have to be rebuilt as scripts or replaced.
• Endpoints change under live clinical work. A hospital refreshes thin clients and moves to Windows 11 while nurses still print wristbands, labels and discharge papers every shift. There's no maintenance window in an emergency department.
• Golden images become image-as-code. Images get rebuilt monthly instead of yearly. Every manufacturer driver baked into the image becomes one more thing to test in every build.
• An acquisition closes. The new company runs Horizon with its own print servers, and the business wants it on the parent's AVD tenant within the quarter.
• Some workloads come home. Plants and branches with latency-sensitive apps stay on-premises with AVD Hybrid, while headquarters runs in Azure. It's one operating model across two locations.
• The driver ground keeps shifting. Microsoft's printer driver changes land in the middle of all of it.
None of these is a one-time project. They overlap, and the business keeps running through every one. Every one of them also touches print. The goal is simple: your next migration shouldn't become another print project.
"The Great Migration" is Nerdio's name for this shift. Its new research report opens with a line from Manchester: "Selecting the platform has become the easy part. Operational excellence will separate the organizations that simply migrate from those that truly transform."
Four forces are driving it:
Together these forces create platform fluidity. Choosing a platform used to be a 10-year decision. Now it's ongoing, so value moves to the layers that keep operations steady while platforms change underneath. That tailwind took Nerdio past $100 million in annual recurring revenue and a valuation above $1 billion in 2025.
The research also shows the plane mid-build. 46% of EUC environments are hybrid today, projected to fall to 23% within 24 months.
Manchester's central point is that modernization has no finish line. In his keynote, operating-model thinking meant a few specific habits:
Most print environments are still run the other way, as a milestone. Print gets rebuilt for each migration, declared done at cutover and left alone until the next platform forces another rebuild. In a world of continuous change, that means print is always either being rebuilt or falling behind.
Applying Manchester's model to print looks like this:
|
Operating-model habit |
Milestone print |
Print as an operating model |
|
Image-as-code |
Manufacturer drivers baked into each image |
Driverless images, so print stays out of the build pipeline |
|
No configuration drift |
Mappings, scripts and exceptions differ by platform |
One policy set, applied the same way everywhere |
|
Unified management plane |
A separate print setup for Citrix, AVD and Cloud PCs |
One print console and policy set across platforms |
|
No finish line |
Print is redesigned at every change |
Print foundation carries forward and adapts |
The short version is the line we use with customers: Change your technology. Not your print foundation.
Earlier this year we wrote about the great un-defaulting: the moment buyers stop letting the industry's reflex pick their architecture and start choosing on purpose. Our point then was simple. Stop inheriting your infrastructure. Start designing it.
The Great Migration is that same un-defaulting reaching the desktop. For years, renewing the incumbent platform was the default. Price shocks and new Microsoft options made teams actually choose, often workload by workload.
The risk is that print gets re-defaulted along the way. Teams leave one platform's built-in printing and adopt whatever the next platform includes, without ever designing print. Then they do it again at the next change.
Platform-bound print is a default. It looks like this:
None of this makes built-in print wrong. It makes it a dependency, and in a multi-platform world, a dependency you pay for at every change.
In an interview at the show, Manchester estimated that roughly 60 million virtual desktop seats still run on legacy on-premises infrastructure. Many stall because of operational opacity. Many environments have passed through several administrators, and today's architects can't safely replace what they can't see. So they renew instead. That's why Nerdio built Compass to read Citrix, AVD and Intune estates before anything moves.
Print is usually the least visible part of that inheritance. Few teams can quickly answer these questions:
Without that data, print is hard to size, hard to test and hard to protect during a migration. It's also impossible to show as value afterward.
Visibility is also what makes flexibility possible. When a renewal shock lands or the business needs a new platform, the team that already knows its dependencies can act. Platform-bound print turns that flexibility into switching cost, because every move means rediscovering and rebuilding print. An independent print layer keeps the option open. The business should get to change platforms when it needs to, not when print allows it.
Nerdio deserves a lot of credit for showing what an independent layer can do on top of Microsoft's platforms.
• It made native Microsoft desktops run like an operation, not a project. Nerdio Manager automates AVD and Windows 365 provisioning, image management, Intune policy and scaling from one place.
• It made cloud desktops affordable to run. Nerdio says customers have reduced AVD costs by up to 55%. Equitable Bank reported 74% monthly compute savings after deploying Nerdio's auto-scaling. In 2026, managed service provider Dataprise reported saving more than 150 engineering hours a month and $72,000 a year on a single AVD host pool.
• It meets customers where they are. Nerdio Manager 8.2 brings AVD Hybrid to on-premises infrastructure, with Nutanix support generally available and VMware vSphere in preview. Global Pools, now in public preview, manage distributed AVD environments across regions and host pools from one place.
• It brings data to the migration decision. Compass reads existing Citrix, AVD and Intune estates so teams can plan from facts instead of a blind one-to-one move.
• It practices what it preaches. Under Manchester, Nerdio runs entirely on Nerdio, as its own "Customer Zero."
• The market has noticed. Nerdio serves more than 23,000 customers and 6.5 million users. It was named 2024 Microsoft Americas Partner of the Year and a Major Player in IDC's 2026 MarketScapes for desktop as a service and virtual client computing.
That's the parallel I kept coming back to in Milwaukee. Nerdio turned desktop management into an operating model. ScrewDrivers® does the same for print: different platforms, one consistent print foundation.
Nerdio is an independent operations layer above the desktop. Customers can change where desktops run without rebuilding how they run them.
ScrewDrivers® is an independent print layer beneath the session. Customers can change where sessions run without rebuilding how output works, across Citrix, Omnissa Horizon, Microsoft RDS and AVD, Windows 365, physical desktops and endpoints like IGEL.
Both bet on Manchester's premise: the platform will keep changing, so the operating layer has to persist. And both turn work that used to be manual into something governed and automated.
|
|
Nerdio |
ScrewDrivers® |
|
Layer |
Desktop operations and automation |
Print and output |
|
Sits |
Above AVD, Windows 365 and Intune |
Beneath the session, across platforms |
|
Keeps steady |
Images, scaling, cost, policy |
Print delivery, assignment, security, job data |
|
Replaces |
Manual portal work and scripts |
Manual printer mapping, drivers and exceptions |
|
Prevents |
Rebuilding operations every migration |
Reopening the print project every migration |
This is a comparison of architectural roles, not an announced partnership or integration.
Nerdio's story is about replacing manual desktop work with automation. Print needs the same shift, because in print, control is security. Every printer someone sets up by hand is a policy nobody audits, a driver nobody patches and an exception nobody remembers.
In many environments, printers inside Citrix, Horizon or AVD are still managed the way they were in the early 2000s:
That's a 20-year-old workflow running a 2026 desktop. It's slow, it doesn't survive a migration, and every manual exception adds to the attack surface. The operating surface and the attack surface are the same thing.
A secure print tool turns those habits into governed policy:
ScrewDrivers® is the Independent Print Layer for the EUC stack. It's more than a consistent console. It's a consistent print engine underneath.
ScrewDrivers® delivers driverless printing for virtual and physical desktops. No manufacturer printer drivers live on Citrix VDAs, AVD session hosts or golden images. Jobs are rendered at the endpoint, which keeps full printer features without adding drivers to the host. It works the same way across Citrix, Omnissa, Microsoft RDS and AVD, Windows 365, traditional desktops and cloud platforms. Users keep native printer features, like duplex, stapling and secure print, without native drivers on every session host.
Design once. Encrypted delivery. Optimized performance. Built around your business-critical workflows.
1. Where do our print policies live, and do they move if the platform changes?
2. Which workflows can't fail, and who validates them in each wave?
3. Where do our drivers sit, and what does Microsoft's driver timeline mean for each location?
4. What print data do we have today, and could we prove continuity after a migration?
5. Will we run print one way for Citrix, another for AVD and another for Cloud PCs, or one way for all of them?
If the answer to the last question is "three ways," print is part of your operating model problem.
An independent print layer is a print architecture that sits outside any single virtualization or cloud desktop platform. Print policies, drivers, routing, security and reporting stay the same when the platform, infrastructure or endpoint changes.
Printing breaks because it is usually configured inside the outgoing platform's policies, drivers and redirection settings. Those settings don't carry over to AVD or Windows 365, so queues, mappings and drivers have to be rebuilt and re-tested.
The native options are RDP printer redirection and Microsoft Universal Print. On new and reprovisioned Windows 365 Cloud PCs, printer redirection is disabled by default and has to be enabled through Intune or Group Policy. Universal Print requires Entra ID-joined or hybrid Entra-joined devices and internet connectivity.
Yes, with the right print layer. ScrewDrivers' Cloud Connector service lets cloud-hosted sessions print to on-premises print servers without a site-to-site VPN or ExpressRoute.
It can be. Logon scripts, drivers baked into images, local admin rights and Point and Print exceptions are hard to audit and easy to forget. Centralized, driverless print management reduces both the operating work and the number of places an attacker can get in.
Since January 15, 2026, no new third-party printer drivers are published to Windows Update for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025. Since July 1, 2026, Windows ranks its built-in IPP class driver first. Starting July 1, 2027, third-party driver updates are limited to security fixes. Existing drivers can still be installed from Windows Update or the manufacturer's installer.
It means print is run as a continuous service instead of being rebuilt for each migration. Drivers stay out of images, one policy set applies across platforms, and print continuity is validated with data in every migration wave.
