There are clouds gathering over the printing industry. These are not dark clouds bringing further market disruption or recession, but the variety of cloud computing and storage options that printers are being offered.
Such is the proliferation of services that are being offered “in the cloud” that the show in eight weeks’ time could easily become the “Cloud Drupa”.
In essence the cloud is merely an expandable offshore storage array. At one time the cost of memory and computing led to hierarchical storage of on-line, near-line and offline.
Today these cost restrictions do not exist, but capacity may be an issue, hence the first reason for the cloud. It is, in theory at least, a secure location for storage away from flood, fire or famine.
The cloud is also ideal for hosting relatively simple applications, web to print being the prime example. There is minimal upfront investment and payment for use is by month or by volume of pages processed. This is software as a service. It enables a relatively low start up cost for a new venture, removing financial risk.
It is useful for vendors because all users are operating with the same set of software: there is no need to constantly sell upgrades or a community of users operating slightly different versions of the application.
The most visible cloud application is therefore web to print. “It has never been cheaper in relative terms,” says Mike Hiscox, international sales director of RedTie. “And over more than a decade of development, it means that web to print is also incredibly feature rich, easier and easier to use so the barriers to entry for a printer thinking about web to print have never been lower.”
The company continues to add features and upgrade the software, which because it is hosted in the cloud, applies to all customers simultaneously. RTT+ plus, expanding the scope of what can be created online was added last year. This year it will introduce design editor functionality.
And the data that is accumulated, about volumes of print handled, types of jobs, is another feature of cloud applications. These can be used by individual companies to improve their marketing or by the developer to understand on a broader scale how customers are using its products.
Hiscox explains: “What we really concentrate on is education and support, not just on how to use our software, but also on all aspects of conducting business online in the smartest way possible. We can be the master craftsmen, while the printer is becoming one.”
The automation should then take the files uploaded to the next stage, stripping the administrative aspects, numbers of copies, delivery address etc, from the pure file information. In an ideal set up, the job needs to be processed as quickly as possible.
“Many printers only one files on the day of production and then discover that there is a problem,” says Alan Dixon, managing director of Workflowz. In a well designed workflow the files are checked on arrival, leaving time to return failed files to the end customer for fixing, assuming that they cannot be dealt with automatically.
Many can, but there will always be a file that cannot be processed in this way, says Dixon. The aim is to reduce handling on the standard, low value jobs, so that time can be focused on the higher profile work.
The Enfocus Connect suite of applications can overlay an MIS and press production workflow to link to web to print, to preflighting and so on.
Workflowz will also offer ganging software to make best use of an imposed plate, something that enables the large online printers to make profits on bottom scraping prices.
It also takes a further step towards a full automation of the process, the lights out printing that QuadTech has always strived for and which Heidelberg CEO Gerold Linzbach believes is possible. “Every time you touch a file, it adds to the cost and the chance of introducing mistakes,” says EFI CEO Guy Gecht, another advocate of the automated workflow.
The question then becomes about where processing is carried out, within the cloud or within the print premises. A whole swathe of applications at Drupa will be offered as cloud tools, exploiting the vast server farms in the US and Europe, but also bumping against data privacy issues.
HP has one of the more ambitious cloud strategies. It is developing Print OS to become a layer of applications that resides in the cloud and which over time might be usable outside of the HP user base. It will become something akin to the Apple Store for printers.
“It is an open and a secure platform,” says HP Indigo business development director Simon Lewis.
HP will provide benchmarking and other comparison services to users to help improve efficiency and to improve service support. “Customers are investing so much in running their operation that they can’t invest as much in running their business,” he says.
“Print OS will be a platform for applications that are developed by HP, and by third parties, and applications that have been developed by our customers.”
”The first applications we have are designed to get jobs loaded into the print production system. OneFlow is providing two applications. One is Print OS Box which simplifies the process of loading jobs that are submitted by email or through an FTP server. This can become part of a web to print portal, and is provided free of charge for the first year.
“The second is SiteFlow which is the order submission application to the prepress workflow. There will be ten apps as part of Print OS by Drupa.”
The benchmarking functionality is a key part of the Heidelberg cloud. Signed up users will be able to measure themselves against best in class printers, whose identity is protected by the press supplier.
Like HP, this will also improve service and support by monitoring presses to note when measurements, say the time taken for a plate to be changed, strays from the standard by a fraction of a second.
It can be an early warning that a problem is about to occur and an engineer assigned or maintenance session scheduled. Likewise a digital press can monitor toner use and place an automated order for additional supplies.
Through Analyse Point, Heidelberg is also enabled colour measurements through the cloud, not to run a full colour profiling and management service, but to check that a brand colour has been achieved for a demanding customer that can be working with a number of print providers.
Kodak’s Prinergy Cloud Services are “taking the know-how of prepress to supply this through the cloud”, according to Allan Brown, Kodak’s general manager unified workflow solutions, so that customers can chose the best combination of applications to run in the cloud and which to run in house.
Processor intensive operations, like crunching large files close to production deadline will stay in house; longer term activities, say job archiving which might otherwise consumer disk space, will head for the server farm.
Colour management can be offered online, but makes more sense close to output. But it should be automated to ensure that the correct profiles for job and output conditions are recognised.
GMG’s Production Server is designed to deliver this, ensuring that the brand colour will appear correctly whether printed on a wide format inkjet press or high speed litho machine.
More and more of print’s customers demand this cross platform consistency. Automating the process is essential to guarantee that in a market where shorter runs and fast turnaround is the norm, mistakes are rare. Printers cannot afford them.
PrintOS will be an environment to host a wide range of pay as you go software.
Print OS will make apps available on mobile.
