What does all the noise surrounding newly introduced Onyx 18 say about development direction at this Canon software subsidiary, and in the large-format market in general?
If you were on the Onyx stand at Fespa 2018
you will have seen personnel sporting Onyx 18
lapel badges and making lots of noise about the
launch of what is the company’s new wide- and
grand-format software – a package that enables
PSPs to prove to customers that colour accuracy,
consistency and conformance to standards such
as G7 and Fogra have been met. Who doesn’t
want that capability? What’s more, it’s the
first solution compatible with iccMAX, the new
standard recommended by the ICC for all wideand
grand-format print applications including
textile and soft signage.
In the words of its show press materials, “the
new release brings next level power and reliability
to the entire portfolio of Onyx products [Thrive,
ProductionHouse, PosterShop and RipCenter] with
the latest Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE 4.8), a
high-speed, high-fidelity print platform for increased
consistency and reliability across proofing cycles.
Combined with new dynamic tools for print
production and optimised out-of-the-box presets,
Onyx 18 delivers fast, superior output for all wideformat
printing applications.”
Mark Lewiecki, senior product manager at Adobe
expands: “With the Adobe PDF Print Engine now
available in all Onyx solutions, customers can
expect even greater reliability and consistency
across their workflows, especially when jobs are
built using Adobe Creative Cloud applications such
as Illustrator CC, Photoshop CC and InDesign CC.”
Sounds impressive, and Bryan Manwaring,
director of product marketing at Onyx Graphics
gets very excited about the development, saying:
“Onyx 18 disrupts the status-quo of existing print
solutions – it puts the power of Onyx into the
hands of PSPs to go after that big account and
distinguish themselves against their competition
with output quality they can literally prove to their
customers.”
Amid the on-stand high energy at Fespa 2018, it
would seem a no-brainer that PSPs would be rushing
to buy a product such as this, but a sobering thought
is that of the 151 PSPs responding to the Image
Reports’ independent survey of those in the UK/
Ireland’s large-format sector, only 13 (8.61%) said
they would be investing in workflow software over the
next two years (15.23% said they’d invest in design
software over the same period, 3.31% in MIS and
1.99% in Web-to-print). But that kind of data won’t
faze Salt Lake City-based Onyx which, according to
president and chief executive Kevin Murphy, has seen
“double digit profit growth over the last three years,
and turnover approaching double digit growth too.”
He’s confident that upwards trajectory will continue,
adding: “We will continue with the same level of
growth as in the previous three years.”
Murphy thinks Onyx has a plan to make that
happen. The company – founded in 1989 and now
a subsidiary of Canon – set
out to help customers achieve colour printing on
electrostatic printers for short run, large-format
printing and continues to pursue a goal to help
them increase productivity, reduce costs, and gain a
competitive edge through consistent colour quality –
across various print platforms where required.
Since its foundation Onyx has shipped over 150,000
Rips – an area where it “will continue to invest in
development/functionality to increase global market
share,” according to Murphy, pointing out that “if you
take China out of the equation we already consider
ourselves to be market leaders” though he admits
that “no-one really knows actual market share”. He
qualifies his claim by saying “our shipments have
continued to grow in what is a flat market.”
And there you have a vital clue to where Onyx sees
its focus for growth – not so much in standalone Rips,
which used to be around 90% of its unit sales – but in
workflow products, AKA ‘site solutions’.
“Printer manufacturers want to optimise their
sale so they become printer islands. But we want to
optimise cross-technology platforms within a print production house – so that the red printed on one
machine is the same as the red printed on another
from a different vendor. And we also want to give
them the data they require to be able to make
strategic decisions for the business, like ‘which
jobs did I make money on?’,” says Murphy
He continues: “Rips are still important to us. We
now have a focus for instance on developing Rips
for the textile print market where dye-sub needs
better colour control. And we will continue working
with printer manufacturers – we work with 125 – to
ensure that if you have a printer we have a driver
for it, but ‘site solutions’ is where our future is.
“It is our aim to become the leader in workflow
products,” Murphy continues, agreeing that they
are higher revenue products, and he goes on to
provide the mission statement: “Your [print] shop
will never outperform Onyx. However you want to
print, trust Onyx to have the solution.”
Having asked Murphy if he thinks large-format
PSPs though are really ready to invest in workflow
products, where there’s been something of a slowburn,
he notes: “The thing is, commercial printers
are getting into wide-format and they know about
workflow/automation capability from their past life
and expect it in this area too. So large-format PSPs
that were ‘artisans’ of sorts are having to wake-up
to software solutions to compete. Plus, the market
has in the past not really had very good solutions
for the large-format market, just tweaked commercial
packages. Software suppliers too are waking-up to
the fact that large-format can be a valuable new
revenue stream for them if they develop proper
products. It’s why we are taking more time talking to
the market and asking the right kinds of questions
about what they want.
“How do we get colour consistency across various
platforms is what we get asked a lot so we work with
kit manufacturers to come up with solutions for that,
and Onyx 18 is a real step up on that front, not just
delivering consistency, but providing proof that PSPs
can show customers, which is a big issue.
“Site solutions for mixed technology environments
is a key ask and a profitable area for us. There’s
a real demand now for businesses to be run
more efficiently and so people want an end-to-end
workflow.
“Take OnyxHub for instance – 2.0 is due out later
this year for an improved user experience. The
market wants a simplified, and where possible a
more automated process, with data coming from the
Rip as opposed to someone having to manually input
it. And they want some sort of analysis rather than
just data so that they can easily see what are the
most profitable jobs or whatever. When people look
at Hub reports they’re often horrified by their media
wastage. They just assume ink is their biggest
wastage, but accurate data reporting often shows
otherwise.
“The greatest growth in software over the next
five years will be information led. We’re based on
the ‘Silicon Slopes’ where we have a great talent
pool and our aim is to develop products that suit
all sizes of PSP and that offer different purchase/
subscription models – including upgrades and
support – to suit everybody.”
