Cary Sherburne reports direct from the big digital show in Boston, where she says there were few new product announcements, but many exciting business opportunities as the industry continues its transformation
Printing trade shows in a drupa year can often be somewhat anti-climatic. Suppliers target the drupa time-frame for their big announcements to take advantage of the global scope of the event. The On Demand Conference and Exposition held in Boston, Massachusetts, in early March was no exception to this trend. There were no major new product announcements at the event, yet there was still much to be gleaned by walking the show floor.On Demand was again co-located with AIIM, a show that features document and content technologies and has its roots in the imaging and records management industry. Xplor also held its conference in conjunction with the show for the first time. Xplor, for those of you not familiar with it, was historically focused on the transactional printing / data centre environments.
All of these environments are converging in the marketplace, so it was terrific that Questex brought the three together. Yet as a buyer at the show, it was difficult to navigate the three venues in order to put together the various pieces and parts required for today’s complex printing solutions.
Why does this matter? The show should be about the buyers and their requirements. If you are looking for variable data solutions, for example, you need the printing technology, the customer facing solutions, and database and content management solutions. Putting that together required quite a journey around the show floor and conference sessions. The information was all there, just not, perhaps, as organised as a buyer would like.
Transpromo
THAT being said, there were some interesting trends featured at the show. For starters, an increasing number of suppliers are entering the high-speed inkjet market, a market that Kodak Versamark has had virtually to itself for some time. At On Demand, the Infoprint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, featured its Infoprint 5000, which generated a lot of interest among attendees. The press is manufactured by Screen, and Screen had its version, the TrueJet 520, on the floor as well. These presses run at 209 feet per minute (fpm) and cost in the range of US$3m. The Xerox 980 Continuous Feed Color Press, is not inkjet solution, but rather uses dry toner and flash fusing (using light instead of heat) that enables printing on a wider array of substrates than normal heat-fusing toner, was shown printing at 300fpm and also selling in the US$3m range. Add to that Océ’s new Jetstream 2200, running at a speed of 500fpm, and the Kodak Versamark VX5000, also running at 500fpm, both selling in the range of US$5m. This was the first time all of these products have been available on the same show floor, although interestingly, the Kodak Versamark only made a virtual appearance – Kodak had no equipment in its stand except scanners, choosing to place emphasis on the workflow and business development aspects of introducing digital services into the mix. This may be a trend for future shows even with other suppliers.
In a related move, the week after the show, HP Indigo unveiled its entry into this space, in what industry analysts are describing as the fastest and least expensive of this class of printers on the market, with equivalent quality.
HP’s new Inkjet Web Press is built around HP’s Edgeline scaleable printing architecture. This new twin-engine duplex printing engine press runs at a speed of 400fpm and is expected to sell for around US$2.5m. It has a faster equivalent speed in terms of images per minute with its wider web, taking webs up to 30 inches, wider than anything else on the market.
For HP, this product makes its acquisition of Exstream Software, an-nounced shortly before the show, more logical. The press will be shown at drupa.
So why all of the emphasis on production inkjet? Suppliers and their customers are looking to transpro-motional printing, or TransPromo, as well as the natural migration from black & white to colour, to fill these large presses. This ability to print relevant promotional messages in full colour on transactional documents, migrating from inserts, to what is being called onserts, was also a hot topic at the show. Software vendors, both internal and external to the equipment manufacturers, are lining up to help customers take advantage of this growth trend. In fact, HP/GMC Software Technology customer Oniya Shapira of Israel won an award at the show for its TransPromo work with Cal, an Israeli-based credit card issuer. The full case study can be found on GMC’s web site.
Much of the discussion around TransPromo has focused on these high-end printers serving large credit card issuers and other large transactional document producers. For smaller printers – the vast majority of global printing establishments – this opportunity may seem out of reach. But in another trend I saw across the show floor, suppliers to the industry are bringing to market ease-of-entry, scaled down versions of their solutions to make it easier for smaller businesses to partake. More importantly, inherent in these entry-level solutions is a clear migration path that allows customers to easily grow their businesses without the need to change suppliers or systems.
One example in the TransPromo realm is Elixir’s Opus SMB, a small to medium business (SMB) version of its Opus composition solution that sells for US$25,000. Combine that with RISO’s 120 ppm HC5500 inkjet printer, at US$45,000 or about US$1,000 per month on lease, and TransPromo suddenly becomes very affordable for companies wishing to produce hundreds or thousands – rather than millions –
of statements each month.
Web-to-print
IN the web-to-print arena, another hot market, printable continues to extend the workflow farther back into the design and creative worlds, with FusionPro’s campaign-centric workflow for creating a customised online response experience using personalised URLs and microsites for variable data publishing (VDP) marketing campaigns. Printable announced an Intelligent Forms feature in FusionPro Web at the show, allowing users to further customise the types of data entry forms they create for web-based ordering of simple to complex collateral, as well as versioned and variable data. XMPie is taking a similar scaled approach in the world of cross-media. Along with its refreshed branding launched at the show, XMPie reconfigured its cross-media suite to meet a broader range of needs across the marketplace. uDirect now comes in Classic, Studio and Premier versions, starting at a few thousand dollars. The company also showed new groupings of its XMPie Personal-Effect server-based line that are better tailored for both small-to-medium sized businesses and large enterprises. PersonalEffect was recognised with a Best of Show award at On Demand. Australia-based PrintSoft had a good presence at the show as well, demonstrating its latest version of Web Direct. This solution offers another interesting approach for printers to differentiate themselves and to gain volume that might otherwise be produced in the office. With PrintSoft, general office printing can be batched to production centres for lower cost production and more favorable volume-based postal rates while making office workers more efficient. They no longer need to create one-off letters from scratch, printing, folding and stuffing them individually, and putting them in the mail stream at full cost. They simply choose a template, which can be pre-populated based on rules and links to enterprise systems, with minimal customisation as needed.
Meanwhile, the print is batched to the print service provider in a way that makes it profitable business for the printer.
Workflow Integration
Finally, there continues to be increased focus on end-to-end integration and automation of workflow, extending this automation to the source – the document creators. Kodak focused on its Unified Workflow, which incorporates InSite Storefront, allowing customers to be even more involved in the production process and moving job definition further upstream. Kodak also announced the acquisition of Design2Launch to extend its collaborative workflow deeper into the marketing and creative worlds. The D2L System is a suite of integrated modules designed to save time and money at every step of the graphics creation process, from project initiation, collaboration and revision to approval and production.
Screen’s TrueFlow is now available as part of Canon’s imagePRESS Workflow Solutions Program, helping users to unify hybrid offset/digital workflows, better leverage their investment in Screen technology and seamlessly integrate the imagePRESS digital press into their existing digital and offset production processes.
Xerox continues to add to its FreeFlow Digital Workflow Collection, most notably announcing FreeFlow VIPP Pro Publisher, a plug-in to Adobe InDesign that enables variable page production without pre-composition, saving network bandwidth by dynamically composing pages at the printer. Presstek and
Press-sense announced a partnership that takes the benefits of fast makereadies offered by Presstek’s DI presses even further upstream, leveraging Press-sense iWay to automate job submission and preparation of these jobs for print.
EFI released Version 3.3 of its Digital Storefront, which now integrates with PrintSmith, offering a more sophisticated alternative to PrintSmith Site for printers who wish to move their web-to-print capabilities upmarket without having to change MIS systems.
This brief recap demonstrates that while there were not a huge number of new announcements at On Demand 2008, the show was exciting from the perspective of the continued move to more integration, scalable solutions with a clearly defined migration path, and an emphasis on a unified workflow extending from concept through delivery and invoicing, with the equipment almost playing second fiddle.
There were many other examples of these trends on the show floor that space prevents us from specifically covering here, and readers should keep an eye
out for more announcements as drupa approaches.
