[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:00:00] DC: This Podcast Conference is sponsored by Fiery, the leading provider of digital frontends and workflow solutions for the global printing industry. Discover how Fiery can help you power up your presses at Fiery.com and through the links in the show notes.
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:20] DC: It takes the right skills and the right innovation to design and manage meaningful print marketing solutions. Welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse, where we explore all facets of print and marketing that create stellar communications and sales opportunities for business success. I’m your host, Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. Thanks for tuning in. Listen long and prosper.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:47] DC: Welcome back to the Fiery Podcast Conference, a four-part series crafted for print professionals eager to elevate their operations. Whether you’re looking to simplify complex tasks, optimize your print processes, or explore new growth opportunities, this Fiery conference offers valuable perspectives and strategies to stay ahead in the ever-changing landscape of print technology.
My co-host for the conference is Pat McGrew, managing director of McGrew Group and the co-host of The Print Report, which plays on Podcasts From the Printerverse. Hello, Patricia.
[0:01:23] PM: Hello, Deborah. We are here to have some fun in an area that is outside of a lot of people’s comfort zone, but dead center on others.
[0:01:34] DC: Yes. I want to start off, well, the title of this podcast is called “How to and Drive Industrial Print with DFE Power.” I really want to start off with a clear definition of what industrial print is in this context. Because to me, industrial printing is literally printing on things that are used industrially, like batteries and things like that.
[0:02:02] PM: So, industrial print has a lot of different definitions. The thing to remember is that in the printing industry, we use words over and over again to mean different things in different contexts. We’re not doing anybody a service by doing that, but it is what we do. So, in this context of industrial print, we are talking about the kind of printing that you might associate with things like coding and marking. But also, in this context, we’re talking about this group of people, group of original equipment manufacturers, and even some printing companies that like to just do things on their own who want to leverage the power of the Fiery capabilities, but because of their environment or because of how they’re doing things, a Fiery platform is not the thing for them. They want to be able to control how different features and functions are used.
So, they want access to the modules either through SDKs, software development kits, or APIs, application programming interfaces, to make it easier to make their environment work the way they want. And Giselle will tell me if I got any of that wrong along the way. But effectively, industrial print for our context is the people who kind of want to do things themselves. It is not necessarily the same as how some other vendors might use that term. I know we’ve talked about some of the big OEM print manufacturers who talk about being an industrial print. In some cases, they actually, sell print modules, which I would call industrial print, but in other cases, they’re selling big machines. From their perspective, it’s industrial because it’s high-powered, highly efficient, and really, really fast.
So, let’s put that one to the side and let’s keep our focus on people who are building environments and ecosystems to create exactly what they need, the way they need it, but leveraging the power and the history that Fiery has put into the pieces that they have available.
[0:04:17] DC: I just want to go back to one thing you said before we get to our guest. Can you help me understand coding and marking?
[0:04:26] PM: Coding and marking. Okay, this is a fun piece of printing that if you do it you know. So, think about if you are taking a cap off of a Coke bottle and you look underneath and it’s got information on it. Maybe it’s got a prize contest number in there.
[0:04:43] DC: Snapple used to have jokes under there.
[0:04:45] PM: Sometimes they had jokes or maybe you pick up a milk bottle at the grocery store and it’s got an expiration date that’s printed on it, or even you mentioned batteries, all sorts of things that have expiration dates, but also, just even inside pieces of equipment, things might be printed. It’s that art of printing using the least amount of data to communicate information about the product, right? So, it might be, we used to call them dot matrix printers. I love dot matrix printers. I cut my teeth with them.
So, dot matrix printers literally print in squares of nine. Each letter takes up nine dots, except which dots are turned on has to do with the information that comes down through the software that drives it. Those are coding and marking technologies. It might be a printhead that hangs off of a piece of industrial equipment where a piece is being made or a label is being wrapped around something, right? It might actually be embedded into a piece of equipment where it actually happens as part of the process of the equipment being or the product being manufactured.
[0:06:01] DC: Thank you for that.
[0:06:03] PM: It is not document printing, and it is not wide-format printing, and it is not commercial printing as we know it.
[0:06:09] DC: Okay. It sounds like it’s a special area of printing.
[0:06:12] PM: It is, it’s specialty printing.
[0:06:14] DC: Yes, because not too many people are printing inside bottle caps.
[0:06:17] PM: Let me tell you that there are just thousands and thousands of companies that do that.
[0:06:22] DC: Well, I meant big packaging printers. It’s not like what you said, it’s probably not –
[0:06:26] PM: There are more of them than there are any other kind of printer.
[0:06:29] DC: Okay. Well, I’m glad that we’re having this conversation and this is part of our conference. So, let’s get to it with the expert that we have here to discuss it with us. So, we are joined by Giselle Robeson. She is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Fiery. Growing up in her family’s quick copy printing franchise in Florida, Giselle has been immersed in printing from an early age, and we love that here on the Podcasts From the Printerverse. With 18 years in digital printing and 12 years at Fiery, she leads marketing efforts for Fiery Impress and other industrial inkjet solutions, supporting OEM partners and advancing Fiery system software, spot color, and VDP solutions. Welcome, Giselle.
[0:07:19] GR: Thank you, Deb. Thank you, Pat. I’m excited to be here to talk about all things industrial with you today.
[0:07:24] PM: Nifty cool. So, Giselle, the first thing I want you to do is tell me if I got anything wrong or I positioned anything incorrectly about industrial print as Fiery sees it.
[0:07:36] GR: So, Fiery sees industrial, definitely accurate in the way you talked about it. We see industrial, you can print on all sorts of different things, and we also think about it as more of sort of printing as manufacturing, as being part of industrial too. So, where we’re focusing with Fiery Impress is on the packaging side of things right now. So, the labels and flexible packaging and that side of things. But it’s all industrial and there’s uses for everything for with Fiery Impress.
[0:08:10] PM: So, let’s dive into this idea of Impress, but let’s start with a little bit of context. For printers who were exploring how to leverage Fiery technology, but not necessarily license of the Fiery device from you guys. The traditional way of working with you was to issue an RFP. And those RFPs could be really big. I know I’ve participated in a number of them and they go on for just pages and pages and pages with every little nuance of what they wanted. “Oh, we needed to be able to do a TIFF file. We needed to be able to do a PCL file. We needed to be able to do a PDF file. Heck, an AFP file, a Metacode file, an Interpress file, whatever.”
So, we needed to do these things, and we wanted to behave in this way because our system has a certain context. It’s a lot of RFPs that Fiery has traditionally responded to over and over and over again. So, that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. Over the years, Fiery got really good at boxing up its internal technology to be able to do smart responses. But then you kind of took a slightly different approach, and Impress was born. So, can you explain where Impress fits in the universe and how it’s different from licensing a digital frontend for my wide format press?
[0:09:34] GR: Yes. So, just start back a little bit, so you may have some viewers who maybe they haven’t heard of Fiery. Maybe Fiery is new, because one of the things we’re actually learning as we move into the industrial space is that, because we haven’t been super active in that space, we’re having to introduce ourselves a lot more to companies and partners in that space.
So, if we’ve got any new listeners here, so a little background on Fiery. Fiery is the world’s largest manufacturer of DFEs, digital frontends, and workflow software for production print. I mean, Fiery DFEs everywhere. Fiery DFEs drive everything from a small office copier, to a proofer, to large and super wide format printers, to cut sheet toner printers, label presses, B1, corrugated commercial packaging label, B2. You kind of name it, there’s a Fiery on it. Actually, we’ve been in business for 30 years and we really sort of kickstarted a lot of the digital printing industry because we actually built the first DFV and we helped commercial printers transition from analog to digital.
So, we had office copiers back then, and they were kind of dumb devices, right? You could just, you put something on the glass, you made a copy, it was a one-off, it was the same every time. With the introduction of the Fiery DFE, we were able to turn the office copier into a connected print device. So, that opened up a whole new world of applications. You could have a run of one, you could have a file where every page is different, personalized printing and VDP, that was all possible now. So, we were able to take and we’ve been involved in a lot of different spaces over the years with those transitions to digital. Wide format printing and proofing and then corrugated and commercial. We’ve been doing this for a long time.
All of that knowledge for the last 30 years and all of the markets that we’ve been active in, that sort of led us to develop Fiery Impress. Like you said, Fiery Impress in the industrial market, it’s a very different model than how we work with the majority of the partners that we work with, who essentially they say, “Hey, we’re building a press. Here’s the spec of our press. Here’s what we need your Fiery to do on the press.” And then we build a DFE. In those cases, it was a DFE that included hardware and software, so a physical product that we give to them that runs their press.
That’s a great process if you’re selling hundreds of thousands of presses because, like you said, it’s a resource-intensive process. It’s an economy of scale, and it makes sense to go through that with those types of products. The industrial market is very different. You can have presses where a manufacturer or someone may have a print engine, but every customer has a different implementation. Maybe they have a different workflow. Maybe they’re printing on something different. Maybe it’s a very unique situation.
So, a one-size-fits-all approach sort of was the way to kind of go about it because it’s like, we can’t custom manufacture a hardware and software DFE for all of these different presses. It’s not efficient for you and it’s not efficient for us. So, what we did is we developed Fiery Impress. So, Fiery Impress basically took everything that we’ve learned for 30 years and we put it in a sort of software-only DFE that’s very flexible and is easier to integrate with pretty much any industrial single-pass type of press.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:13:17] DC: Girls Who Print provides women in print and graphic communications with information resources, events, and mentorship to help them navigate their careers and the industry. As the largest independent network of women in print and a nonprofit organization, our global mission to provide resources, skill-building, education, and support for women to lead, inspire, and empower has never been stronger or more accessible. Through our member platform and program, as well as regional groups forming around the world, your access to Girls Who Print is just a click away. Gentlemen, you are most welcome to join us as allies. Get involved and get empowered today. Link in the show notes.
[EPISODE CONTINUES]
[0:14:03] PM: So, part of what you’re bringing to the table by creating this Impress environment is the ability to fast-track automation, right? And in industrial print, very often we see that they want to automate. We know that a lot of the manufacturing processes are automated, but this particular element often has a lot of manual bit twiddling that seems to happen. So, how would you describe the efficiency that Fiery brings, that Impress brings, into this kind of industrial environment?
[0:14:37]GR: Well, because of just the nature of Fiery DFE and how our goal is to help customers really get the most out of their presses, get the best performance, get the best color, and the most efficient workflows. So, we have a lot of tools built into Fiery Impress. If you have jobs that are the same, we provide ways to automate common jobs so that you’re not inputting the same job properties over and over. If it’s a workflow that has a pre-press system or they’ve got another type of setup, we can integrate in with that. So again, they can do whatever setup they need and then just send the information to Fiery Impress, and we see all of those job properties or settings, and it just reduces touches. There’s other more advanced automation tools on Fiery Impress that we do.
So, we have a lot of different tools. And one of the things I think is interesting about this market is we have so many people that are just new to digital, completely. We have several customers who, when they integrated an engine with Fiery Impress into their workflow, they were learning how digital worked. They came from an analog environment, a flexo environment. So, that’s a technology shift that they had to do there.
I think it’s sort of baby steps. First, it’s like, okay, here’s how digital works. Here’s just the benefits of digital, bringing it into your workflow. First off, no setup, no plates, no messy, make-ready things like that, no long runs of material while you’re trying to get your press on caller and registration, because firing a press makes all of that so much faster and more efficient. So, I think we get them started with, okay, this is how digital works and then we kind of, okay, here’s, now that you’ve figured out this process, here’s tools that you have to make it even easier. Whether it’s something as simple as a hot folder or a preset, I mean, again, these are somewhat basic concepts, but when you’re talking to customers, it really makes a difference in their everyday workflow.
Then we can talk about more advanced tools like our job flow tool or integrating with like Esko Automation Engine or all of these different ways, because again, it’s very customized for each customer’s environment.
[0:16:48] PM: So, I’m going to put my Deb hat on for a minute and ask a question that I think I always forget to ask. And that is, what does somebody who’s working with you, who’s looking at Impress, what do they have to know in order to integrate Impress into their environment. Because one of the things I discover in my assessments is often in industrial settings things happen in that industrial setting, but there’s nobody who actually know how it happens. There’s like no single source of truth about how a file gets created, what has to be in that file. How do you work with somebody who might be in that state?
[0:17:30] GR: Obviously, obviously, when we’re talking with new partners who want to do this, our business development people, like Marcelo, who is wonderful –
[0:17:39] PM: Love him.
[0:17:39] GR: – will sit down and talk with them and figure out, “Okay, what’s your workflow? What’s your goal? What is your goal that you’re trying to do with your press? Is it an existing press? Are you building a press?” Basically, whether we’re starting from scratch or whether we’re coming into that’s already built. Then, okay, what’s your workflow? What’s your file format? Is it roll-fed? Is it sheet fed? How many colors do you have? What resolutions do you need? What screens do you need? Do you need inspection? Do you need, what’s your color management workflow? All of these different things. We talked about TIFFs earlier. Is it a TIFF workflow or are you wanting to stream? Those are two different workflows.
[0:18:19] PM: Giselle, let me stop you there. For those who don’t understand the difference, so we talked about TIFF as a file format. What’s the difference between working with a TIFF file format and streaming?
[0:18:32] GR: Okay. So basically, TIFF file format is sort of, I guess, sort of an, I call it more of an offline type of workflow. So basically, you save a file from however you’re producing it as a TIFF file, and then that TIFF file gets transferred into Fiery Impress, either sort of manually or in a hot folder or some way. It’s a single file that is on Impress, you import it and then you print it. That’s sort of how it goes.
With streaming, this is a little bit of a different workflow because what you’re doing is we’re actually ripping while we’re sending information directly to the print electronics. So, this is great for VDP. If you have big VDP jobs, those are very large. So, if you wanted to kind of have a static file and then put it on the Fiery, that’s sort of a cumbersome process. Streaming is much more efficient because you essentially send it and then we start sending the data directly to the print head electronics. And as soon as the very first bits of data are being received by the electronics from Fiery Impress, it starts printing. So, you’re ripping while you’re printing, you’re kind of working on the whole file as it’s going in a more efficient way to be able to do things.
[0:19:46] PM: So, a print vendor might talk to you about printing on the ramp, right? That is a phrase that they’ll say where it literally from the minute I send the file, it’s going to start working versus waiting to process the whole file and then print page one.
[0:20:02] GR: Exactly. Different customers do things in different ways. We have customers who they prefer a TIFF workflow whether because that’s what works for their operation and that’s fine. And we have customers that want to do streaming to be able to take advantage of all the benefits that you get with streaming. Our ultimate goal is to have everybody doing streaming because again, that’s really how we think you can really harness the power of Fiery Impress and everything we can do is in a streaming workflow.
We realize, again, every workflow is different. Some customers, maybe they start off with TIFF, again, new to digital customers. Maybe streaming is something they’re just not quite there yet, which is fine. Start off with a TIFF workflow and then transition into streaming. The beauty of Fiery Impress is we can customize it to whatever the customer needs for their workflow that works best for them.
[0:21:00] DC: Giselle, I need a little clarification on the VDP aspect of it. I have been at three printing shows in the last three weeks and there are VDP solutions out there for many companies. Does Fiery replace that or does Fiery work together with those other systems?
[0:21:20] GR: Okay. Fiery is very flexible with how we work with VDP. So Fiery, if we have tools that come with Fiery, we have a free tool for creating VDP files. It’s called FreeForm Create. And if you don’t have another VDP tool that you’re working with that outputs files in a VDP format, like PDFVT, like PPML, if people are still using PPML, we have a tool called FreeForm Create that allows you to make VDP files and then send them in an efficient format to the
Fiery server that we process it. So, we have that.
If you have a workflow where you’re using a VDP tool, there’s lots of VDP tools on the market, we can accept those files in that optimized format, and we can process it and send it to the print engine. We work with VDP, we love VDP. Basically, again, very flexible, however it works in the customer’s workflow, we can consume whatever they send us.
[0:22:21] DC: Is there any advantage, though, in working within one system besides it being a bundled price and one platform?
[0:22:27] GR: Well, it just depends. I assume, you mean, a VDP, like a VDP workflow. So, it just depends on what you’re doing. If we go into a shop that does a lot of VDP and it’s a workflow they already have set up, they’re used to creating files in a certain way. We can certainly consume those files and process them very efficiently and get the file done. Again, what we’re finding with some of our customers who are sort of new to digital and are wanting to take advantage of the benefits of digital, which includes VDP, that’s with tools like FreeForm Create come in, because it’s a free tool. Any customer can use it to create a file that has variable text images, or bar codes which is what we’re finding as very, specially interesting for our customers in the industrial market, and they can create their own VDP files.
So, hopefully, that answers your questions. It just depends on what the customer wants to do.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:23:21] DC: Fiery is revolutionizing industrial printing with Fiery Impress. Winner of the 2024 Pinnacle Award for RIP software, Fiery Impress is a scalable, affordable, turnkey digital frontend that’s easily integrated with any digital inkjet press or workflow. From one-off proofs and versions, through the longest run supported on press, Fiery Impress helps you unlock your industrial print superpowers. Whether you’re a seasoned industrial print veteran or designing a new press from the ground up, Fiery Impress combines the streaming speed, image quality, color accuracy, and automation your customers depend on to drive any high-speed inkjet press. Innovation, performance, and reliability, all at your fingertips. That’s Fiery for industrial print. Visit Fiery.com/impress to learn more. Links in the show notes.
[EPISODE CONTINUES]
[0:24:24] PM: Deb, I think I can help a little bit there. I think in our industry, we toss around terms and we assume everybody knows what they mean. And VDP is one of these interesting terms that doesn’t always mean the same thing to everybody that you talk to. So, variable data printing. At its heart, it is meant to take data from a database of some variety, a data pool of some variety, and merge it into some sort of template in order to create this personalized output, right? And that data might be directly moved from the database into the template, or it might actually trigger an activity that says, “Oh, when you see this data in the database, go grab this image from this other database and create this custom output.”
So, VDP, when it’s coming towards an Impress workflow, it might come as already static pages where that work has already been done. We don’t recommend that highly because those
files get really big, but that was kind of an older way of doing it. And if you’re doing small print runs, sometimes people do it that way. Alternatively, there are a set of stepped processes that happen where the template is located in the library, the variable data is located in one or more libraries, it gets merged on its way in. What happens is that Impress sees the inbound template and sees the data, and Impress actually makes that little miracle of personalization to happen, right? So, it can happen that way. Or alternatively, it could be the tool that you get for free from the Fiery team, and that’s really great.
One of the applications I’ve seen used a lot for that is things like personalized greeting cards, personalized calendars, these kinds of things that often in franchise print shops happen with very small quantities. You wouldn’t want to spin up a $100,000 VDP system to do that, right? You want to do it much more efficiently. It’s more efficient to do it using their tool than it is to say use, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Word with an Excel database. We’ve seen all sorts of things.
[0:26:39] DC: Exactly.
[0:26:39] PM: Because it’s designed for print. So, I think that would be the difference that you would see.
[0:26:45] DC: Yes. So, Giselle, with what you’ve been saying, in some cases, the starting point is, “Hi, this is digital printing, and let’s do that first. Let’s get that under control first.” So, how are you providing training and support to people who need to switch over? Do the print customers need to do anything differently, or do they just go about their life submitting a file, whether it’s a Fiery system or somebody else’s?
[0:27:15] GR: That’s a good question. So, obviously, when we work with partners who are then working with the customers that are having Impress in their shop. What we do is we work with our partners to make sure that they have all the right materials that they need to then go train their customers on all things Fiery. We have a lot of our own tools, like we have free e-learning and we have a lot of different tools to help people get the most out of their Fiery, whether it’s a cut sheet Fiery or Fiery Impress.
So, we’ve also had other partners and customers that they wanted a bit more customized training. They’ve worked with our professional services team to actually purchase a professional services package, which could go in and helps set up things on their Fiery and teach them a little bit more about how to do things. That’s one way that we do about it.
Now, in terms of the end customers and sending their files for digital, our end hope is that an end customer sending a file to a print service provider that’s doing things digital or analog, our end hope is that there’s no real burden on someone – a client having to set all of their files up or need to know anything different about that. It’s more on the print service provider who has the options of printing things sort of digitally or analog to kind of understand, look at this file, what is the best way for me to produce it? Actually, I have a great example of a customer here that I can talk about.
So, we have a customer, one of our partners, they’re called Colordyne. They’re based in Wisconsin. One of the things that they do is they manufacture inkjet engines that are retrofit on an existing flexo press. So, you think, well, wow, why would you want to do that? Well, it’s actually interesting because these are customers that have these flexo label presses. They’ve been in service forever. They’re still cranking along. They’re still doing exactly what they need to do. But the market for how you’re producing things offset, it’s changing. Customers aren’t asking for those long runs anymore. They’re asking for shorter runs. They’re asking for more customization. They have different SKUs or there’s different markets. They want to bring in personalization.
The providers, the converters out there who are looking at this and seeing what their customers are asking for, they’re like, “Well, gosh, we need to do something digital. Digital is the way to do what these customers are asking, but I don’t necessarily want to buy a whole new label press because we’re talking a couple million dollars here. Those are expensive.” We have this great offset press. I wish there’s a way we could have the best of both worlds, but actually, you can do that with retrofitting. Because what you do is you keep your same exact offset flexo, your flexo press, and then you mount an inkjet engine on top of your transport system. So, you now have two different ways that you can print. You could print – actually three different ways. You could print just flexo, if it’s that type of job, you could print digital, if it’s that type of job, or you could do like a hybrid type application, where you can do a little of both.
So, one customer I’m thinking about, they’re called AutoMate Label. They have a bunch of locations, but the location I visited was in North Carolina. They had offset flexor presses, and they wanted to do this. And so, they worked with Colordyne to get the Colordyne engine mounted on their label press. So, they were brand new to digital. They knew that they needed it. They didn’t know anything about it, but they knew if they didn’t have digital, they’d be left behind.
Now, they have Fiery Impress with this Colordyne engine on their press. They have so much more flexibility in the type of jobs that they can accept. So, as I said, they can run jobs sort of all flexo or all digital or in a hybrid mode. An example of hybrid, let’s say that they have a label that they’re printing. And the label has a large area of solid coverage. It’s also got a logo that has a spot color on it. Then there’s also an image. So, if they wanted to print all that flexo, I mean, think of all of the different colors that they would need to have. Think of all the plate changes that they would need to do, the setup, that would be just a huge kind of pain, and it’d be expensive for them to do.
When they use hybrid, they can basically choose to use flexo for the large coverage area of the label, then use digital for the spot color and the full color image. So, it’s super cost-effective. Then, as I said, they don’t have the make ready, they don’t have the plates, and they’re on color and registration instantly, and they can do much shorter runs. So, it’s really, these types of customers, Fiery Impress, with a digital engine like the one from Colordyne, has really opened up a new world of applications for them. And this particular customer has also really driven down their waste. I think when I talked to them, their stock waste had been about 40% and since they’d implemented Fiery Impress with the digital engine on their line, they were down to about 15% and they wanted to go lower. Their customers love the quality.
So, again, it just really opens up a whole lot of different opportunities. And again, this is a customer that was brand new to digital before having this. They’re really happy with what it’s been able to do for their workflow.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:32:42] DC: Print Media Centr provides printspiration and resources to our vast network of global print and marketing professionals. Whether you are an industry supplier, print service provider, print customer, or consultant, we have you covered by providing resources and strategies that enable business marketing and creative success, reporting from global events, these podcasts, Project Peacock TV, and an array of community lifting initiatives. We also work with OEMs, suppliers, industry organizations, and event producers, helping you connect and engage with our vast audience and achieve success with your sales, marketing, and conference endeavors. Visit Print Media Centr and connect with the Printerverse. Links in the show notes. Print long and prosper.
[EPISODE CONTINUES]
[0:33:38] PM: So, that is a brilliant use case. I mean, honestly, I do see that a lot where people are retrofitting digital heads onto sometimes really, really old press equipment because the thing about analog equipment is it doesn’t tend to die, right? It has a long, long life. There are 100-year-old Heidelberg presses out there still running.
So, with that, and I think to just be clear, your direct customer of Impress is going to be somebody who is either an integrator who does that kind of work or they’re going to be an original equipment manufacturer who’s building something new, right? And then they’ve got their customers who are the end customers who are actually using equipment. So, in that vein, you’ve partnered with two big names that we know, right? We know Esko and we know GIS. And in those contexts, what were the value propositions for say an Esko or a GIS to say, “Let me look at Impress as a way to implement the capabilities that I’m looking for?”
[0:34:51] GR: So, with both of those, it was really a way to give more value to the partners that we all work with. So, let’s talk about, in our core business, like you said, we’re based on partnerships. All of our business is based on partnerships. So Esko, let’s talk about Esko. Esko, obviously the market leader in the packaging space with pre-pressed software and color management and the beauty of their workflow is that they can manage the whole plant, analog and digital through Esko software. They saw an opportunity with Fiery Impress because it goes back again with the power of partnerships is to sort of know your strengths, right? We work with press manufacturers who choose Fiery because building a DFE is hard. Building a press is hard. So, we don’t go out and build a press and press manufacturers who try to build a DFE, they find that it usually ends up being a lot more complicated than they expect it to, and it eats up a lot of resources that honestly would be better spent working on that press.
So, with Esko, I think both of us really saw an opportunity to give a package to customers that really leverages both of our strengths. With the Fiery DFE, we’re known for performance, for ease of workflow integration, for color management when we need to, in digital environments. And then Esko, of course, they’ve already got set up in the shop that’s got all of the pre-press workflow and that color management across analog and digital. With Fiery Impress, we sort of present this sort of unified front to make it easier for going into these shops. If they’re bringing in digital, a digital press, with Fiery Impress into an Esko workflow, that integration means it’ll be a much easier integration because we know it works.
Actually, something really unique that we’ve done with Esko is we co-developed this sort of really unique color workflow that’s configurable based on what a customer needs. So, color management. Fiery, obviously, we’re known for color management technology across all of the spaces that we work on. We’re extremely proud of our color technology, but where we really excel is in digital environments across Fiery and non-Fiery-driven digital processes.
Esko’s color management is great across a combined analog and digital workflow. So, that means no matter how you’re outputting your piece, whether it’s analog or digital, going through Esko, it’s going to have that brand consistency. What we did is we did something unique with Esko, that customers that have Fiery Impress in an Esko environment, they can choose to either use our Fiery Color Management Workflow, or we actually integrate the Esko Color Engine into Fiery Impress. So, it’s a seamless color workflow that they’re used to managing. They don’t have to do anything different, but then they get the benefits of Fiery Impress on a digital press. So, it’s a really flexible approach for customers, and it helps ease any concerns about and consistency because it’s your same workflow, you’re just outputting it on a different device.
That’s something that we’ve worked a lot on with Esko, and one of the customers that’s going to be taking advantage of that is Hanlabel, our partnership with Esko and Hanlabel, they’ll be using that workflow. So, this is something that’s really cool and we’re excited to have out there.
[0:38:16] PM: So, Giselle, does that mean I have to be one of the Esko-Impress customers to take advantage of either Fiery or Esko Color Engine? Or is that something that you can make available to other potential OEMs or integrators as well?
[0:38:29] GR: So, right now it’s only available as part of Fiery Impress, but who knows what will happen in the future because Esko is everywhere. But as of right now, it’s only available on Fiery Impress.
[0:38:41] PM: Okay. Then, I know that you work with GIS as well, and it’s the same kind of arrangement where you’re working with them to create a package that integrates in the GIS environment?
[0:38:52] GR: Exactly, because when you’re integrating Fiery Impress onto a press, one of the main parts where you have to do the integration is the communication with the electronics that are driving the press. So, we actually have an application called Data eXpress, which is little pieces of code that can go on to a press, a press manufacturer integrates this code into their press, and then it makes it – it’s sort of pre-baked code that makes it easier to communicate with Fiery Impress. They don’t have to learn our APIs necessarily, we just give them the code and they integrate it.
So, what we’ve done with GIS is we’re working with them to sort of have even more pre-integrated systems there so that any press or who chooses GIS electronics, they don’t have to do any additional work because Fiery Impress and GIS, they’re already pre-integrated. And GIS electronics work with basically, every inkjet head out there. So again, it’s sort of like a plug-and-play compatibility that we’re trying to do. Because again, building a press, there’s a lot of things that go into building a press and partnering with companies like Esko and GIS, we’re just trying to make it easier for the press manufacturers to have one less thing that they have to worry about. We do these things well, we focus on our strengths, we give you something that helps make your press run better, then that’s more time that’s freed up for you to work on your press, to do what you need to do on your press and not have to worry about the DFE end of things.
[0:40:26] DC: I have a weird question. I know that there’s cases where if a printer buys ink from another company and puts it in a press, the press manufacturers get a little upset about that sometimes, especially if there’s an issue with the press after it sort of nullifies their service agreements and things like that. If they put something in the press that wasn’t “authorized.” Is there any of that liability if you start putting code into a press?
[0:40:57] GR: Well, I mean, ultimately, we’re working with our partners. So hopefully, we’re all on the same page about what we’re wanting the press to do. I mean, either way to communicate with the DFE, you need to have some type of code that’s able to talk to a DFE. So, I think it’s a little bit of a different situation than different ink like that.
[0:41:19] DC: So, Pat, I can just put code onto a press and if it breaks it, oh well or –
[0:41:25] PM: That’s really not the situation.
[0:41:27] DC: Okay.
[0:41:29] PM: In the situation that Giselle’s describing, she’s working with the press manufacturer as well as the integrator or the OEM of –
[0:41:38] DC: So, the patches or whatever it is, they’re approved and everybody knows what’s going on?
[0:41:43] PM: Yes. What she’s really doing, I mean, her Data eXpress tool is really lovely because what it does is it normalizes the data that, so what’s coming from Impress and what the press actually needs, the only way you can do that is by understanding and having a relationship with the press manufacturer or the device. I mean, it might not even be a press, right? It might be marking technology inside of some other device. So, you’ve got to have relationships.
We wouldn’t advise that a printer sitting somewhere in the Midwest just sit there and go, “Oh, maybe I can make this work with that and write a little bit of code and try and make it work.” I’m not saying it’s never been done. Not saying it might not work for some period of time, but you brought up a good point. Patches, the things that keep code up to date are typically in the hands of the OEMs and the code producers, and if you were to go rogue and decide to build your own, you would be losing out on all of that expertise and all of that concern about keeping things current.
At the end of the day, I don’t think that your concern is going to happen. But we’re somebody to go rogue and write their own? If it broke, they would get to keep both pieces.
[0:43:02] DC: Right. I mean, we have seen some Frankenpresses out there. So, I mean, that was – I actually saw the first Frankenpress with you, and I didn’t understand how people were just deciding to put their own ink in that press. Okay, well, that makes me feel more comfortable, and it does make sense. I mean, you don’t want to also have to do all your own updating when everything around you is updating. Giselle, you want to add anything to that?
[0:43:30] GR: Well, and sort of back to what Pat was saying, we work with the integrators. We work with the press manufacturers. Before they go implement Fiery Impress at customer sites, they’re testing the integration on their own. It’s not like we’re quite going and building these things on the fly. There’s a lot of discussion back and forth between our teams and the teams that are partners that we work with. So, I think it’s a little bit of a different situation, but yes, it’s very flexible. There’s a lot going on, but we’re always in lockstep with our partners, what they’re doing, and I think everyone’s good with that.
[0:44:06] PM: The world of industrial is just a different kind of approach to handling the requirements of a digital frontend, and whether it’s a soft frontend or a hard frontend, it’s still a different world. So, what we’re hoping everyone will take away from this episode is that no matter where you are in the print manufacturing chain, Fiery’s got a solution for you. So, if you’re an OEM document printing press manufacturer or a desktop printer manufacturer, there’s a Fiery solution for you. If you’re somebody creating something that needs print technology in it and needs to be able to handle incoming information, whether that’s a PDF file, a TIFF file, or whatever the heck it might be, Impress might be the solution that’s going to work for you.
If your normal way of working used to be to send RFPs out to everybody, before you do that, you might actually have the conversation with the Impress team to find out what you can buy as a package that would fast-path your way forward. I was actually involved in a conversation with the Impress team back last year, where an RFP had been let and when we looked at the RFP, we went, “Oh, my gosh, Impress does all that.” Instead of having to wait three years to bring a product to market, it would be possible to bring that product to market in under a year. That’s the difference that you get when you start looking at a package like Impress to handle your industrial needs.
[0:45:36] GR: Exactly. That’s a perfect way of putting it.
[0:45:38] DC: Giselle, thank you so much for your time, for joining us on this episode of the Podcast Conference. All the links you need to connect with Giselle and everything that we’ve spoken about today will be in the show notes. Make sure you listen to the episodes after this one and before this one to get a comprehensive overview of the Fiery offerings. And until next time, everybody, Fiery long and prosper.
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[0:46:06] DC: Thanks for listening to Podcasts From the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars, and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com. We’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcasts. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.
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