Charles R. Gehman is executive vice president and chief technology officer at Printable Technologies, Inc. (www.printable.com) He sets the company's strategic technical direction while managing the company's intellectual property. Gehman directs the research and development of all Printable services and software, and is responsible for technology partnerships.

He represents the company on industry technical associations and standards bodies, including the technical committee for PrintTalk, of which Printable is a founding member. Gehman currently serves on the executive committee for the Research & Engineering Council of the Graphic Arts Industry, Inc. and as co-chair of the council's Digital Network Production Systems Committee. In addition, Gehman is a member of the IEEE and the Internet Society. He has written numerous articles and white papers for publications such as High Volume Printing, Publishing and Production Executive (now PrintMedia), Graphic Arts Monthly and Canadian Printer. In addition, Gehman has spoken at a number of conferences including the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts (TAGA) and Seybold Seminars.

He was formerly vice president of technology for DAX. While with DAX, Gehman was responsible for the design, development, management and delivery of application services, as well as the company's professional services organization. Gehman was the primary architect of PrintPlanet.com, the popular e-community for the graphic communications industry. Prior to DAX, Gehman founded Irongate Networks, an e-commerce company serving the business-to-consumer space, and has held numerous technical and management positions with graphic-arts services and computing-equipment companies.

Last week, Printable announced the purchase of key assets from Collabria including their mainstream PrintCommerce version 3.0 software and their installed customer base. Printable had worked with Collabria for several months on other projects and reportedly has significant insight into the workings of Collabria’s technology. The company has promised little to no down time for Collabria customers. Gehman spent time with PrintPlanet.com this weekend to explain what has and will happen.


Chuck, explain the logistics of “little to no down time” as you transfer Collabria clients.

We are going to do everything we possibly can to prevent any customer downtime. We are sending a team of 5 people to Collabria first thing on Monday morning (June 25th) to work out the details of the transition. This team includes business and technical staff.

We are hoping to keep the existing servers up and running at Collabria's hosting provider in the San Francisco Bay area, while we install and configure a mirror set of servers and infrastructure in Printable's San Diego data center. Then we'll choose a weekend late night to "cut over" to San Diego - confirm that everything is up and running and customer data is intact, then shutdown the Collabria operation about 1 week after that.

If all goes according to this plan, our intention is that none of this will happen without plenty of warning to customers that might be affected by this.

In a strange and bad way, this situation is good for Printable because you basically acquired the technology to make your offering more complete. You now “own” instead of “share” technology with Collabria - is that right?

It is certainly unfortunate that this happened this way, and my heart goes out to all the great people at Collabria who have lost their jobs. So it is really, as you say, "in a bad way." That said, the background is that we were already on a track to acquire the technology, just under different circumstances. Your statement is essentially correct.

How many clients did they have on this platform?

Collabria had about 200 Printing service provider-type customers (i.e., Printers) using this platform. I'll go a little further and tell you that Printable, before this acquisition, had about the same number: close to 200. So, we're doubling our installed base. And if you count the Printer's customers, we're talking about several thousand users who are using the two platforms today. And we're not just talking about small companies here, either. There are some household names in there, too.

One of Collabria’s founders, Robert Hu told us two weeks ago that an announcement was about to take place regarding the relationship. Were you going to take over their PrintCommerce customers anyway?

Our staff and their staff were beginning to work out support and technology issues related to both Printable assuming a support role as regards to Collabria's Printer customers, and connecting Collabria's applications with our Dashboard and other applications. That's it in a nutshell. At this point, what you'll probably see in the near future is a Printable-branded version of the PrintCommerce suite of applications, and we will continue with our plans to integrate our applications and the Collabria stuff.

What can you say to customers and prospects who may fear switching to another company that may not be financially stable?

Printable is well capitalized, and has very strong backers who include Moore Capital Management in New York, Totem Investment Partners here in San Diego, two of the founders of Sun Microsystems and Louis Rosetto, the founder of Wired Magazine. All of these investors participated in our most recent funding. Our Chairman and CEO, Jim Sullivan was formerly president of RR Donnelley's book group and has founded and run several very large and very successful graphic arts industry firms.

What specific steps are involved for contacting current customers and will they pay more by using Printable?

On the business side, we will be contacting those Collabria customers who haven't already proactively called us. Of course, there will be new telephone numbers to call for support and these customers will get to know some new people at Printable, but we certainly plan to provide an excellent level of support - something that we have become known for at Printable.

Another difference is that in their move to Enterprise selling, Collabria had planned some new pricing for Printers that would have resulted in higher fees for many customers using the system. We think Printers will be pleased by our pricing structure in contrast. After all, we are "The Printers Ally"!


Thank you Chuck. Keep us posted and we wish you the best.