Durst has acquired a majority stake in Triple C Labs, the company that earlier this year became a major investor in workflow management software business CoCoCo Platform.
The business will become part of the Durst Kyveris AI set up which seeks to automate print production and has demonstrated robot operators in proof of concept demonstrations. Durst claims that Kyveris is “building industrial intelligence for digital print production”. It sandboxes ideas and automation concepts using data from previous jobs to handle colour management, substrate profiling and press operation.
CoCoCo Platform will fit in the Kyveris concept by linking the different applications and machinery ensuring the trouble free flow of data to enable machines to set up and to feed data back to a central hub automatically. AMRs and digital twins are part of the thinking behind Kyveris.
CoCoCo Platform will be the glue in this architecture while also operating independently of Durst. The team behind the developer will remain together and will gain the support needed to accelerate development – “faster releases, broader integrations, deeper data models, a stronger open eco system, not a smaller one”.
Durst will provide access to different sales channels, support and provide the visibility and credibility that is difficult for a small business to achieve.
The core technology that CoCoCo has developed and is now testing at a number of beta sites is a way to bring different systems together by mapping production information into its format and then mapping the same data to the destination equipment. It collects data about the jobs that any printer has produced so has production information on every piece of equipment in the business.
This can be examined in one place rather than trying to access the data that a press provider has, that the prepress workflow gathers or that comes from finishing equipment. It becomes possible to use this with an AI engine to optimise production based purely on the data that the individual print business has.
“We believe that AI in production should not depend on exposing your data to a standard LLM,” says CoCoCo director Karl Ciz. “There are lots of platforms from a single manufacturer; we collect data from all manufacturers. It’s an agnostic approach that lets us work with other OEMs.
“Durst enables us to scale that concept. It is a partner that shares that vision.”
He calls the CoCoCo Platform print’s “orchestration layer”, positioned to automate scheduling, managing production in the most efficient way while maintaining venture neutrality.
While Durst is putting CoCoCo into its Kyveris project, this is not part of its open software initiative which includes Callas Software, the PDF workflow provider that was acquired 15 months ago. There is no connection between Callas and CoCoCo. At least not yet.
