Software development is where it’s at in large-format. So who’s doing what? Simon Creasy investigates.
Wide-format software providers have never had it so
tough. A decade or so ago some products, like Rips,
used to sell for as much as £2,000 – or more – a pop.
Today, users can choose to lease – sometimes for just
tens of pounds a month – or buy – for just a few hundred
pounds – a software solution that they can download
instantly from the internet with no training provided, or
indeed needed.
As a result, over the last few years the primary focus
of wide-format software companies has been to create
products that are cheap to buy and easy to use, which
ultimately leads to greater levels of commoditisation
and makes it increasingly difficult for developers to
make their offer stand out from the crowd. However, that
hasn’t deterred some software providers from trying.
Over the last few months a number of companies have
introduced innovative new levels of functionality to
existing products and launched brand new products to
meet customer demands.
Take the example of EFI. In December last year, it
released version 6.5 of its Fiery proServer, which was
specifically designed with the burgeoning textile market
in mind.
“The main focus was on the area of colour
management because in the textile market you have
quite a lot of different ink combinations and different ink
versions,” says Stefan Spiegel, general manager of EFI’s
Fiery wide-format print server/software operations.
To this end, EFI introduced Fiery Textile Bundle, to be
used with its Reggiani digital inkjet printers, which includes
new Fiery DesignPro Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop plugins and the latest Fiery proServer digital front end. Although
the first shipments of the product are still being bedded in,
EFI is already beta testing version seven, which launches this
month (April), just in time for Fespa.
“It’s a completely new development from our side
because it’s the first time we are going in the direction of
Fiery Command WorkStation [EFI’s print job management
interface],” says Spiegel. “We have approximately 1.5m
users of Command WorkStation and version 7 is going to be
the first time we are talking about what we are calling ‘one
Fiery’. That means you have a Fiery that can drive your toner
device and at the same time drive your inkjet devices.”
He says the introduction of this functionality, which
he describes as a “big step” for the firm, was driven by
customer feedback.
“When you go out to visit our customer base, if you
see a customer who is doing inkjet I am pretty sure you
will find a cutsheet in the office as well and vice versa.
When you go into shops customers are running a lot of
applications sometimes and that is getting more and more
complicated. This is the first time we can drive all devices,
including cutsheet, from one application.”
These changes have been largely driven by printers
trying to eradicate inefficiencies, according to Spiegel.
“Printers are coming more and more under pressure
because the square metre price is going down, so the
only way to keep their margin up and make money is to
speed up their machines in terms of set up and getting
data faster,” he says. “People are looking for easier
applications that can control their complete [print] shop.”
John Davies, product group manager, workflow, at
Fujifilm Europe, agrees. He says he has witnessed a
growing trend of print customers who are looking to consolidate the number of Rips they use.
“In the past what companies tended to do is they
would buy a new piece of equipment to fit a specific
purpose and it would come with a Rip from that vendor
– it could be ColorGate, Caldera or Onyx – and then very
quickly they would have six pieces of equipment in
house all with a different Rip and front end. What that
means is not everybody who works on that production
floor can use every piece of equipment to its most
efficient level.”
So what’s increasingly happening nowadays,
according to Davies, is customers are looking to
standardise their front end so that machine operators
can jump from different pieces of equipment and
this in turn helps to drive efficiencies. He sees the
current pressures and trends in the wide-format sector
following the same “efficiency pattern” that general
commercial print followed a decade or so ago.
“We go into a lot of wide-format companies and they
tend to just have a Rip on the front of a device and
everything that happens before it gets there is a very
manual process, which is just like the commercial print
world was 10-15 years ago,” he says. “But I think the
pressures are coming into the wide-format space as well
now, where there is a bit more competition so there is
a need to have a bit more automation and a bit more
efficiency. All of these things put together are driving
companies to think ‘we have the equipment, but we are
not using the print capacity that we’ve got efficiently’.”
He says one way wide-format printers are addressing
this capacity issue is through tools like the wide-format
automatic solution tilia Griffin, which was added to
Fujifilm’s suite of XMF workflow products late last year.
“Tilia Labs [the developer of tilia Griffin] already
had a product layout and planning tool for commercial
print, but they saw a need for a similar product in the
wide-format sector,” says Davies. “If you’re printing a
lot of irregular shaped items on the same material,
the question is ‘how do you maximise space and
squeeze it together on one sheet?’ What we found
some customers were doing was they were manually
doing this using InDesign or Illustrator. It was literally
someone’s job to take all of these jobs in – 50 of
these items, 20 of these and 30 of these – and then
drag and drop them and arrange them on the sheet,
whereas Griffin will do that automatically and work out
the most efficient way of printing it. That can turn a
couple of hours of manual work into 10-15 minutes
within the application.”
This automation of processes that might historically
have been dealt with manually is a growing theme from
customers who are trying to optimise the way they
operate.
“Automation and efficiency is where people look to
first when they are getting squeezed on price,” says
Davies. “How do I get more out of what I’ve got without
taking on more people or buying more equipment? It’s
looking back and saying ‘this machine is only printing
two hours a day and we have a seven hour day in our
business’. Or some customers might say ‘we are quite
busy all day, but we are not printing all the time, so
how do I make my operation more efficient up front so
that when the jobs come in they go quickly from being
booked in by the customer service person to being ready to
be printed on the shop floor’?”
“Automation is everywhere” at the moment, says Jonathan
Rogers, international marketing manager at Onyx Graphics
“Customers are asking for tools that increase production
automation and output capacity, reduce manual error and
have the means necessary to prove superior prints to their
customers in a simple manner,” he explains. “PSPs are
looking for ways to cut costs and reduce errors in the print
shop and are looking for automation to help. Wide-format
printing is inherently complex and not always straightforward
to automate. This is an area we see growing in demand.”
At Fespa 2018 Onyx will be showcasing the latest release
of Onyx Hub, which features real-time and historic trend data,
including ink usage and media waste, as well as actual costs
for ink, media, printer and labor rates for job costing.
“These new features help business owners and production
managers answer questions such as ‘did we estimate that
job correctly?’ and ‘did we make any money on that job?’,”
says Rogers. “Onyx Hub also helps eliminate inefficiencies in
production workflows and drill down from site-wide data to job
level to delve into business needs such as printer utilisation,
production bottlenecks, training needs, and more.”
PSPs are at different stages of digital transformation, but
there are some commonalities across all businesses and this
has played a large part in influencing the latest iteration of
products brought to market by software providers, according
to Arnaud Fabre, product manager at Caldera.
He adds that “agile” print shops are eager to source
products that offer “differentiation and high added value
propositions” and that many of the features added to Caldera’s Rip software version 11.2, which was released
in February, were in direct response to customer
demands.
“They wanted more help to master the software,
so we integrated direct help access links per module
and views through HelpLinks; they wanted help with
media savings for special applications where the media
is textured and so orientation really matters, so we
added ContourNesting 180°; they wanted a flexible
and common interface to manage multi-layer printing to
print special effects, so we introduced MultiLayer; and
they wanted to have the ability to handle the optical
brightness on all they media they manage – either
opaque or transparent – so we added TotalColor qb,”
says Fabre.
Likewise HP has launched a number of products
responding to the needs of customers, says Phil Oakley,
large-format business manager UK and Ireland at HP
“Last November, we partnered with award-winning
designers, the Yarza Twins, Silas Amos, and Smirnoff
to launch the beta programme of HP SmartStream
Designer for Designers (D4D),” says Oakley. “The
new SmartStream D4D software is a suite of design
solutions that enable designers to create up to 20
variations on any design, and to take control of their
own creative process.”
Over the course of the last 12 months HP has also
expanded its HP Click Software for use on all DesignJet
T-Series machines “in response to the demand we were
seeing for an accessible, low-maintenance printing
experience. With no need for a driver, the software
offers easy, simple one-click printing, plus drag and
drop multipage PDF printing and real-print preview, while
optimising media usage and costs,” explains Oakley.
Going forward there are a number of areas where
software providers think there is scope for further
product innovation and growth. One is Cloud-based
software.
“Everything to do with Cloud processing and Cloud
colour management is a big, big topic,” says EFI’s
Spiegel. “The people in the shops are really looking
for help and that is coming from the Cloud. It’s a big
trend that we see more and more of and we are trying
to address this. I’m not sure if we will do something on
this for Fespa [this year], but it’s clearly something for
the future.”
It is something Rip provider Shiraz Software is already
focusing a lot of its efforts and energies on, according
to the company’s business development director Ramin
Shahbazi. He says Shiraz has created some “exciting
stuff” to capitalise on this growth area.
“One of the things we have is an end-to-end Web-toprint
solution,” explains Shahbazi. “So we create the
front end, the middle ware and we have the back end
– the server – and it is all fully integrated. At the moment
if a job is submitted via ecommerce then what tends
to happen is the customer has to prepare the job then
they send it to the Rip to be printed. We’ve effectively
eliminated that process – it is all automated.”
A potentially even more exciting opportunity that Shiraz
has identified is the introduction of “image streaming”
technology.
“It’s similar to Spotify, where you stream music without
giving the files away,” says Shahbazi. “Well we can stream
images without giving the files away to the production
site.” He says the company has developed a streaming
technology that allows it to “securely and transparently”
stream images for printing.
“Take the example of a website that offers artwork.
The user can select the piece of art they want to print
online, but the job doesn’t go to the printer with the image.
The image gets streamed at the time the job is being
produced from a very secure Cloud storage. We have a lot
of technology that protects that image so it can’t be saved
and it can’t be hacked.”
This is an area where he thinks a lot of innovation and
software development could occur in the future as artwork
and designs potentially become more valuable than the
print itself – especially in markets like home furnishings,
which he thinks will become much more digital print
orientated.
“I haven’t been this excited about this part of the market
for many years,” says Shahbazi. “It’s been the same old,
same old, whereas now I can see an area where we can
add a lot of value to someone who is looking for a solution
like that.”
Products that add value is what customers are
increasingly on the lookout for at the moment, so you can
expect to see further innovation from software providers in
these emerging niche areas, in addition to solutions that
help to drive print shop efficiencies, in the months ahead.
