At its latest Premier Partners event in Europe, Xerox showed the iGen5 for the first time, considered print’s place in the communications mix, and looked ahead to drupa.
Xerox was showing its latest iGen technology for the first time in Europe at a Premier Partners event in Prague in early October, and the addition of a fifth colour station with the iGen 5 press, capable of adding blue, green or orange to CMYK, extends the possible colour gamut significantly.
‘We did our research and those were the colours that we needed for the first phase,’ said Andrew Copley, Xerox’s president for Global Graphic Communications Operations. ‘There will be more colours to come.’
Around 200 Xerox customers attended the event, where there was a good deal of discussion around the issue of print’s evolving place in the marketing mix. Peter Lancaster of UK firm Documobi spoke about the future of print beyond QR codes and Augmented Reality, showcasing his print-to-mobile technology, while Iris Stewart, national customer development manager for Fuji Xerox in Australia, outlined five steps to cross media success.
These were: have an integrated strategy with defined goals and a clear and concise message across whichever media are used; assess what usable data you have to work with at the start of the project and work with the customer to improve it if necessary; understand your clients, their products and customer sets to identify cross and up-sell opportunities; in-depth measurement of all elements – this proves the success of cross media; and keep campaigns alive by continuous improvement.
The fact that cross media was a focus of the event was picked up on during a press briefing with senior Xerox executives. Digital Printer asked whether the very term ‘cross media’ was something that Xerox felt it should educate its customers away from using, given that the customers’ customers – the marketers – do not use the term.
Jacob Aizikowitz, president of Xerox company XMPie, replied: ‘What we are seeing is that today people use terms such as multi-channel, omni-channel and integrated, and even at XMPie we are changing some of our terms. We are saying to our customers: your customers are speaking a totally different language; they are talking about things like marketing automation. We are looking at bridging media and marketing and we need our customers to speak the language of their customers. We are on a journey with that. The important point is that there is a lot of market research that says that marketers understand the important value of print media. We are pushing integrated digital and high end print very strongly.’
Mr Aizikowitz spoke briefly about the potential integration of XMPie with marketing automation software, and said that Xerox was working with some major marketing automation vendors on cross-embedding their products. Printers do not need the full marketing automation functionality, he said, they just need a flavour. ‘We are building integration points that make sense,’ he concluded.
Xerox executives also touched upon the company’s hardware development activity, pointing out that there has been a good deal of this recently (the iGen 5, Color 800/1000, Versant 80 and Rialto 900), considering the proximity of drupa. Robert Stabler, senior vice president of the Graphic Communications Business Group at Xerox, emphasised that the acquisition of Impika in 2013 was ‘one of several key pillars’ in its inkjet strategy. The first fruit of this acquisition was the hybrid roll-to-sheet Rialto 900, which was launched at the Hunkeler Innovationdays in February.
‘It’s a new and disruptive category for Xerox,’ Mr Stabler continued. ‘Customers have said that they need inkjet to have entry points that they can get into, and Rialto is perfect for that.’
Andrew Copley picked up on the inkjet theme, saying: ‘Drupa will certainly be big on inkjet and it will be big for Xerox in inkjet as well. Customers want to know where you are going with inkjet technology if they are going to spend significant capital on a press; they want to know that more media and inks will be coming. We invested in Impika and we’ve shifted a lot of R&D to that space, while still focusing on xerography, and making sure that we continue to lead in that space. At drupa, there will be some new things in xerography but the majority will be in inkjet systems and workflow software.’
Xerox also used this Premier Partners event to give some exposure to a couple of small technology partners that may be of interest to all print providers. These were Creads – an online network of creative studios that can respond to briefs for design proposals and compete to win the job – and SnapCam, a UK-based mobile app for speeding up personalised photobook creation.
