The man responsible for HP Indigo Alon Bar-Shany has plenty of pointers for digital printers.
Bar-Shany is unshakeable in his belief that there is a world of opportunity for printers out there, and has a host of figure s to back up his claims. Whether it is the daily 211,000 net gain for the human race (births minus deaths) the rise in digital printing (40 per cent a year), the certain arrival of digital print at the top of the capex and dollar value to printers table by the time drupa 2012 comes around, he is armed with a bucketload of statistics to underpin his arguments.He says digital printing companies started out 15 years printing almost entirely marketing collateral. Since then, and in the last two or three years in particular, the applications they are working with has expanded dramatically. Short run books, direct mail, tanspromo, and photobooks are all taking off in a dramatic way.
Bar-Shany surprised and delighted his audience at the seminar by claiming that the page numbers printed digital would explode from 10 billion a year in 2008 to 100 billion a year in 2016, that extrapolation was manna from heaven for the gathered throng. He says, “the pattern is clear, look at the figures for the past eight years, which have shown the same tenfold growth, and the next ten years will if anything grow faster with the forces currently at play.”
HP Indigo claims a 50 per cent share worldwide of the digital print business sat the high end, a figure which rises to 74 per cent, the company claims, in the Asia Pacific region. Bar-Shany says this is because HP is clearly focused, and has a winning technology. He says “Indigo is a complex technology made simple, with electronics, chemistry and engineering that is not at all easy to replicate.” Must be true, because ion the 16 years since Indigo appeared there has been no attempt by anyone to come out with something similar.
However Bar-Shany says many offset printers are even now still sceptical about digital print, and are often too busy to even think about it seriously. However he says that simple economics will ensure that most printers open up to digital, as work will be lost if they don’t.
He also believes that the company’s new SmartStream Director will help commercial printers incorporate Indigo, as it takes much of the control management process and automated it from end to end, covering everything from job capture and weh to print through to dispatch and billing. He says, this software solution, which can integrate with others such as Direct Smile and variable data programmes really takes printers into a new field with minimal effort, and will enable them to become marketing services providers, offering far more than print, and reaping far more reward.
