Josh Orum

Walk through any Fortune 500 office and you'll find the same graveyard: hallways of blinking printers that nobody owns, IT tickets stacking up, and a server room running software that predates the iPhone. Josh Orum saw this and named it - not as a hardware problem, not as a maintenance issue, but as a category waiting to happen.

He calls it PrintOps. The idea borrows from the DevOps playbook: treat print the way you treat software delivery. Cloud-native. People-centric. Automated. Observable. No more device-centric thinking. No more on-prem print servers costing a fortune to maintain. Just printing that, in Orum's words, "just works - for everyone, everywhere."

Orum became CEO of Pharos Systems International on October 1, 2023, stepping into the role after two years as the company's Chief Marketing Officer. He had arrived at Pharos in 2021 on the back of a private equity acquisition by Spotlight Equity Partners, where he had served as an Operating Partner - embedding into portfolio companies and wiring up their marketing functions. Before that, he spent 14 years running Loud Dog Corporation, a San Francisco branding agency he founded in 2001 that built emotional connections between B2B tech brands and their customers. Clients included Google, Cloudera, and Intel.

There is a through-line. The agency work was about making technology feel human. The private equity work was about scaling what already worked. The Pharos work is both at once.

Pharos is not a startup. It was founded in 1992 - the same year the World Wide Web opened to the public. It has served enterprise and higher education customers across government, financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing for over three decades. When Orum stepped in, the company already had credibility and customer loyalty. What it needed was a category.

The PrintOps announcement in May 2024 was a strategic stake in the ground. Orum positioned it as the modernized, cloud-native, user-centric approach to printing and its supporting infrastructure. Not print management. Not managed print services. PrintOps. A discipline, not a product.

Behind the category work is a very real product. Pharos Cloud 4.0, launched in November 2024, brought direct IP printing via the cloud - letting enterprise users print directly to network printers without touching on-premises infrastructure. Blueprint 6.0 gave IT teams a concrete migration path from legacy on-prem print servers to cloud architecture. The product releases tell the story Orum wants told: this is not a lift-and-shift vendor. This is a rebuild.

Orum made the argument publicly in a Quocirca podcast: the print industry had spent decades building solutions that were essentially on-premises tools bolted onto cloud infrastructure. Lift-and-shift. The result was cloud theater - it looked modern, but behaved like 2009. His argument for truly cloud-native, hardware-agnostic solutions with open APIs was the intellectual foundation for the PrintOps category.

The pitch to enterprise IT leaders is that printing belongs in the same modernization conversation as identity management, endpoint security, and employee experience platforms. Not a silo. Not a facilities problem. An IT problem with a clear cloud-native solution.

Pharos serves corporate enterprises, higher education, government, and financial services markets. Its zero trust print security framework speaks directly to a post-pandemic reality: workers printing from anywhere, on any device, over networks the IT team does not control.

Orum studied Government and History at Claremont McKenna College - a humanist training ground, not a CS program. His earliest ventures were classic dot-com era experiments: Surparts, an online marketplace he founded in 1999, and a product management role at Tomorrow Factory in 2000. Neither made him famous. Both made him fast.

In 2001, at 25 or so, he started Loud Dog Corporation. The name alone signals something about his instincts: this was not the usual enterprise consultancy. Loud Dog was a San Francisco branding agency with a specific thesis - that B2B technology companies needed to build emotional connections with their customers, not just technical integrations. For 14 years, Orum ran it. The client roster grew to include Google, Cloudera, and Intel. It was, in retrospect, a masterclass in B2B empathy.

When he joined Spotlight Equity Partners as an Operating Partner, he brought that 14 years of pattern recognition to a new context. PE operating partners are accelerants: they go into portfolio companies and fix the thing that's broken - usually go-to-market. Orum did this across multiple companies, including stints as COO/CMO at Nicus Software and CMO roles at Identity Automation and cFive Solutions.

Pharos came into the Spotlight portfolio in 2021. Orum was the marketing operator assigned to the deal. Two years later, he was running the company.