case study
How Clarvida Replaced 200 Print Servers—and Redirected IT Toward Work That Actually Matters
“So many support hours from IT are no longer needed to get you set up with that printer. They can figure it out themselves, usually quite easily.”
— Richard Roati, IT Server Administrator, Clarvida
The Summary
As a national healthcare services company, Clarvida operates across approximately 250 U.S. locations, serving vulnerable children and families, with a lean central IT team of about 60 people keeping it all running. Before PrinterLogic, every one of those offices ran its own physical print server. That meant 200-plus servers to procure, configure, ship, patch, and eventually replace every five years. The risk and cost of those servers was unacceptable.
Since deploying PrinterLogic in 2015 Clarvida has eliminated that expensive and vulnerable infrastructure. Print servers? Gone. Print-related IT tickets have dropped dramatically, and employees across all 250 locations install printers themselves, in minutes, without involving IT.
Customer: Clarvida
Clarvida (formerly Pathways) has spent more than 50 years as a national provider of behavioral health, foster care, autism services, and community-based care for children, adults, and families. The organization's mission is to brighten lives and communities with access to the care and resources everyone needs to thrive—a mission it has expanded steadily over five decades and now aims to grow further, with a goal of tripling its impact to serve 180,000 clients annually by 2030.
Industry: Health and Human Services
The Challenge
A Hardware Liability Hiding in Plain Sight
Clarvida's offices range from four-person community sites to locations with more than 200 staff. Sites are spread across the country, most without dedicated on-site IT support…and every one of them had a print server.
Offices with fewer than 20 employees ran a repurposed Windows 7 workstation as a combined file and print server. Larger offices got a dedicated Windows Server in the data closet. Either way, each machine needed ongoing patching, driver management, disk space monitoring, and a full hardware replacement every five years.
“After five years, you’re ordering and procuring and putting in place a replacement file and print server, moving everything over, and then starting all over again. That’s easily 200 servers that needed that maintenance.”
— Richard Roati, IT Server Administrator, Clarvida
At $5,000 per server, that's $1 million in hardware cycling through the budget on a continuous basis, before you even consider the IT labor to build, ship, configure, and migrate each one. Because there's no local IT presence at most sites, every replacement meant travel. Multiply that across 200 locations and it stops being a simple maintenance task and becomes a company-wide program.
The day-to-day burden was just as relentless. Clarvida doesn't give standard employees local administrator rights—a deliberate security policy to limit malware exposure. That means installing a printer wasn't something an employee could do themselves. Printer installs required IT to connect remotely, authenticate with elevated credentials, figure out which printer was appropriate, and complete the install. On top of that, employees needed to know the name of the local print server, a detail most employees had no idea how to find.
“[We had] easily 5,000 tickets a year, maybe an hour of staff time each.”
— Richard Roati, IT Server Administrator, Clarvida
For a traveling employee visiting an unfamiliar office who needed to print, the situation was identical. Every location, every new hire, every visitor who needed to print meant a ticket, a wait, and an IT resource pulled from something else.
The Solution
Centralized Management, Serverless Infrastructure
Clarvida deployed PrinterLogic in 2015, replacing local print servers with a centrally managed virtual appliance (VA) configuration. Printer driver management moved to PrinterLogic, and the physical server at every office was eliminated from the equation entirely.
The employee experience became very straightforward. An icon in the system tray opens the portal, where employees navigate to their office location, select the printer they need, and install it via a direct TCP/IP connection. Employees do not need local administrator rights to add a printer—the security constraint that previously made every printer install an IT event is no longer a factor. The process is identical whether an employee is at their regular office or visiting one of Clarvida's other locations.
Direct TCP/IP printing also eliminated another persistent operational frustration: the stuck print queue. Without a print server intermediary, jobs route directly to the device, removing the queue management overhead that previously required IT intervention to clear.
For IT leadership, the platform provided centralized control and removed bottlenecks. Printer profiles are configured once and applied broadly, with default settings for duplex, black-and-white printing to manage consumable costs at scale. Role-based access controls restrict sensitive printers, such as those used by HR, so they are only visible to authorized users. Regional administrators manage printers for their own locations without requiring involvement from the central IT team, and license utilization is visible to anyone with administrative access.
Routine maintenance tasks that cause friction with other vendors are handled cleanly in PrinterLogic. SSL certificate updates, for instance, require only a single action in one location—a meaningful operational simplification compared to platforms where certificate changes must be applied across multiple system components.
The PrinterLogic deployment has proven well-suited for Clarvida's environment. With strong uptime requirements and a preference for keeping infrastructure in-house, the team has run on the same configuration reliably for more than ten years.
The Results
The Business Impact of Eliminating Print Servers
1
A Measurable Reduction in Capital and Operational Expenditure
Eliminating more than 200 local print servers removed a significant and recurring cost from Clarvida's infrastructure budget. Hardware procurement, configuration, logistics, and the IT labor associated with physical deployments across remote sites no longer factor into the equation. The consumable savings add up as well: centrally managed printer profiles that default to duplex, black-and-white printing reduce toner and paper costs across all 250 locations.
2
IT Resources Redirected to Higher-Value Work
Print server maintenance and printer support tickets were consuming meaningful IT capacity at an organization where that capacity is needed elsewhere. Across IT staff and end users combined, Clarvida estimates they are saving approximately 10,000 hours per year previously consumed by print-related issues—roughly 5,000 hours of IT staff time and 5,000 hours of employee time spent waiting for or requesting printer assistance. With employees installing their own printers, the volume of print-related support requests dropped substantially. Plus, IT staff are no longer driving to remote offices to perform hardware replacements.
3
Operational Continuity Across a Distributed Workforce
For a healthcare services organization where field staff move between offices regularly, printing reliability is an operational requirement. Treatment plans, case documentation, and client-facing materials still depend on the ability to print from any location without friction. PrinterLogic made that possible by standardizing the experience across every site. Clarvida has systematized this reliability through its onboarding process: new employees learn where the icon lives during orientation, so they arrive on day one already equipped to print without any IT involvement.
“We don’t get those tickets anymore. Once you’ve seen the interface one time, you go—oh, look, there are all these other states in here.”
— Richard Roati, IT Server Administrator, Clarvida
4
A Platform That Scales Without Adding Complexity
Clarvida has grown since 2015, and PrinterLogic has scaled with it. Adding new locations, onboarding regional administrators, and expanding the printer inventory have not required proportional increases in IT overhead. The platform's delegation model allows the central team to distribute management responsibility without losing visibility or control.
“Adding administrators is super easy. We’ve got a lot of different roles, we can delegate permissions to other folks so they can add printers.”
— Richard Roati, IT Server Administrator, Clarvida
5
More Than 10 Years of Reliable Operation
Infrastructure that requires constant attention is infrastructure that consumes budget and focus without returning strategic value. Clarvida's deployment has required neither. The VA configuration has delivered consistent uptime across more than a decade, and the platform's administrative tools surface the information the team needs without demanding it.
“This is one we don't need to look at a whole lot, because it just works.”
— Richard Roati, IT Server Administrator, Clarvida
Conclusion
For CIOs and CTOs evaluating their print infrastructure, the real question is rarely about printing. It is about where IT capacity is going and what it is returning. Clarvida's legacy environment required ongoing capital investment, consumed IT staff time that could not be recovered, and generated support volume that scaled with headcount rather than declining with maturity. It also imposed a structural dependency: because standard employees lacked administrator rights, every printer installation required IT involvement, which compounded the ticket burden at every location.
PrinterLogic changed that equation. The servers are gone, the support burden has dropped, and employees across 250 offices connect to printers on their own in minutes—whether they are at their home office or across the country. For an organization whose mission depends on reliable operations in the field, that is not a minor IT improvement. It is infrastructure working the way leadership needs it to.