This Month's Spectrum Summary:

(The following is an excerpt from the April 2007 issue of Spectrum, a proprietary monthly briefing published exclusively for the clients of I.T. Strategies, Inc. © 2007)

OnDemand and AIIM Expo The Hard Copy/Soft Copy Continuum- It's One World, Ready or Not

This month we meet with Mark Hanley and Marco Boer for an AIIM/OnDemand expo debriefing. The giant event with over 400 exhibitors was held earlier this month in Boston. It was in effect two shows in one, AIIM mostly software and "content management," and OnDemand for printing systems. Mixing these two was a reminder that the hardcopy and soft copy are really one world, one continuum and that business models need to reflect this.

Two overall observations: There seems to be a growing sense of concern about the future of our industry, but this can be healthy because it motivates people to think and push. Another is that technology for technology's sake is becoming ever less relevant.

One interesting question was why HP did not exhibit its new Edgeline IJ technology at the show. Also, there were only a few wide format printers, surprising since a major audience of OnDemand is the commercial printer. HP did display one significant new product, the Z6100, expected to replace the DesignJet series. Kodak demonstrated a new pair of NexPress models, the higher end unit specified to match iGen3 performance. The new Dainippon Screen inkjet press was demonstrated by Screen and by IBM as the Infoprint 5000. Océ introduced its new 4-color VarioStream 9240.

The vendor rush to color is motivated in part by increasing margin pressures on monochrome systems. But a problem is that at this point the color VDP market is limited since variable data to be printed is limited. And in any case, by definition, it lends itself to shorter run jobs. So VDP and high speed digital printing to an extent are incompatible. Nevertheless, one rationale for investing in high end color VDP may be that it's easier to scale down than to scale up.

Another trend observed is a blurring the distinction between true production printing and the mid-range market. The mid-range continues to be a parallel market, not a substitution market. At the production end, most digital presses are running short run rather than variable data jobs. But users are finding much higher margins with niche applications, for example photo books. It can be the content rather than the quality of color print that makes a marketing program a success. In this sense, it is software that can be the most important.

Although at AIIM software seemed to be where most of the action was. It's a very competitive, volatile industry. Also, it has added to the complexity faced by printing job shops and commercial printers. Finding skilled people who really know software is one of the toughest problems reported by these businesses. Problems can be due to hardware or software, but in either case it is the hardware vendor that needs to deal with it.

The bottom line is that the industry is moving forward; there's a lot of work to be done, but it's not dying. It will get more challenging as users work to build interface programs so more and more business operation functions can occur over the Internet. Page volume won't decline, but there will be less and less revenue per page for the bulk of applications, especially at the high, production end.