Heidelberg has announced Zaikio as the device independent platform for the printing industry, intended to pave the way for fully digital workflows from file creation to delivery. If all goes well this will free the industry from JDF and the complications and costs that JDF connectivity has entailed. Heidelberg has been one of the supporters of JDF and was one of the founding partners.
But the data exchange format has never lived up to its promise and is considered too unwieldy, resulting in lengthy and expensive implementations. It was also devised in pre internet, pre digital days so focuses on production workflows for litho printing.
“The problem has been that JDF has been limiting rather than enhancing,” says Karl Çiz, Zaikio. “The documentation for how JDF should be implemented is 1,700 pages long. The core focus of establishing a simple working relationship between parts of the production process is not so simple to implement.”
Zaikio is not intended to replicate JDF, but will side step these issues. It uses JSON, a data exchange format which is not limited by set parameters. “It is as big or as little as you want it to be,” says Çiz.
This is the underlying reason that Heidelberg bought Crispy Mountain last year rather than to acquire its Dataline MIS. The concept fits in with the Heidelberg strategy towards digitisation of the printing industry, where the press is one component in the workflow, not the purpose of that workflow.
CEO Rainer Hundsdörfer says: “With the open industry platform Zaikio, Heidelberg is actively meeting the challenges faced by the printing sector in the digital era. This marks the next milestone in the industry’s digitisation.”
The cloud based environment has three components: the Zaikio Account to identify the end business and allowing access to all applications through a single, highly secure log in; the Zaikio Hub connects the users to the hubs that have become part of the community, either through API links or by being developed as apps for Zaikio; and Mission Control as management core to send a file on its journey through the connected apps. It relies on a standardised data format using a hierarchical semantic approach that allows the different tools to read the file and then write to the file in the same easily exchangeable format.
The promise is speedier and more direct connectivity and a stride towards the end to end connectivity of the printing industry, bringing print inline with other industries that have implemented data connectivity to drive automation.
Automation of workflows is the next step in the digital shift that Heidelberg is driving through its business and, it hopes, through the printing industry. And Zaikio is the environment that will enable this to take place.
