In the spring of 2001, Vio Worldwide suffered a company's worst nightmare… Industry publications announced the company would be out of business by the end of the summer. Competitors generously offered to "help" Vio users through the "difficult period."

The ringing of the death knell was premature! During the summer of 2001, Citizen Limited, a media and technology consortium, acquired Vio from British Telecommunications, plc. and Scitex. The new management team - made up of former executives of the Trinity Mirror, the UK's largest newspaper publisher - pulled together an impressive turnaround.

Early on, Vio Worldwide kept to the UK and EU markets to focus on advancing the technology. Its offering caught the eyes and ears of LMS Capital, the VC arm of London Merchant Securities, plc. (a company with over $1billion in assets), and, shortly after, Vio received the funding needed to kick it into high gear.

Now, two years later, Vio is targeting the U.S. market with its wholly owned subsidiary; Vio Inc. Vio has new partners, new products, new initiatives, and new executive leadership in its U.S. headquarters. Earlier this year, Alan Darling was appointed Executive Vice President of Vio Inc. with responsibility for Vio's sales and marketing efforts.

WhatTheyThink correspondent, Gail Nickel-Kailing, caught up with Alan between transatlantic flights to get his take on the SAVVIS/WAM!NET acquisition and to learn about "The New Vio" and Alan's vision of the future.

WTT: Before we dive into the "new" Vio, would you care to comment on the
SAVVIS Communications' acquisition of WAM!NET?

AD: I think it's good news for the industry. People need to be able to rely on outsource service providers like us and like WAM!NET, though we provide services in a different way. They have a very different business from us.

WTT: Vio has been extremely quiet for the last couple of years. I'm sure the company hasn't been sitting still - would you fill us in on what's been happening since the world thought you'd closed down?

AD: In a word: investment. We have been investing our time to focus on our core competencies, specifically on our skills in software application development for workflow solutions, networking, and interfacing and integrating with other workflow applications through the use of standards like JDF.

The management team at Vio has driven quite a transformation. It makes sense-they are former senior executives of the UK's largest newspaper publisher so they understand the needs of the prepress, printing and publishing industries. They initially focused on the UK market before offering products in the United States. The clear advantage for the American market is that our clients here are receiving a mature suite of products and services.

Citizen has invested more than $10 million into Vio since the acquisition two years ago-a large portion of it going into R&D. As you could imagine with this kind of investment, the technology advanced exponentially. The systems are open. They support industry standards like JDF and solve real problems like marrying upstream and downstream processes. Overall, Vio customers now have a system that intelligently moves files and JDF metadata in an automated manner up and down the supply chain. The feedback is that our services are helping clients to reduce costs, decrease human error, and increase speed to market. The great thing is that with our strong financial backing and continued R&D, Vio's offering is only going to get better!

WTT: The competitive landscape still seems pretty active. With your competitors taking advantage of the confusion in 2001, have you been able to reestablish your customer base to your satisfaction? How do you differentiate Vio from the competition?

AD: Vio's customer base has been loyal. We must be on the right track if David Brown, the Production Director of Wyndeham Heron, one of the UK's leading print groups, calls it a "godsend!"

In the States, we intentionally took a low profile to wait for the time when our product offering was right for this market. We believe that time is now, and it's exciting to see how the market is responding.

For the most part, our competition is the homegrown solution. In a technology-driven environment, these highly customized solutions tend to leave networks open to security breaches, do not support standards like JDF, and can have significant limitations. Mark Fletcher from the Daily Telegraph sums it up the best: "We focus on our core business and don't develop software." Likewise, Vio partners with best-of-breed solutions - typically at the behest of our customers - to deliver the necessary horizontal integration across workflows, such as online preflighting for advertising delivery. Vio's "application-agnostic" approach to integrating third-party software into our core apps makes this possible.

In terms of how we differentiate ourselves, it is probably easier to answer this as a user who has just moved into the vendor space. During the last nine months of my time as the CTO and COO of a major advertising prepress shop, I was convinced that the only way to counteract the shrinking workforce was to re-engineer the workflow-specifically, to allow the valuable people in the organization do what they do best, requiring that they spend as little time as possible "pushing paper" and hunting down files. Files had to be where we needed them, when we needed them.

Vio also believes in this approach, and this is what makes the company fundamentally different from its competitors. Consider the ease with which the upstream data can be captured through customized and branded job tickets, and the fact that the information is captured as JDF metadata, the reality of integrating inter-enterprise workflows in today's many-to-many relationships is actually here today! Add to that our willingness to interface with other third-party apps in an application-agnostic manner (as opposed to a forced ASP environment), and you have a very interesting box of tricks for this open-platform world in which we live.

I am not aware of any applications (other than custom-coded solutions) that can do-or even attempt to do-this in an open way.

WTT: Your Web site describes Vio as a secure data distribution service, providing software and network management solutions. So what does that really mean? Isn't Vio "just a pipe?"

AD: Predominately Vio is a service for efficient and secure external workflow management, servicing a whole supply chain with a user-friendly, Web browser-based application. Part of our service offering is to procure and manage, at a customer's request, the communication lines, whether that be Internet, leased line or ADSL. Because we don't own the lines, we provide our customers the greatest flexibility at the lowest cost. This has become very popular for many of our customers, who see that we take away the headaches of having to interact with the telcos. We provide 24/7 monitoring for any technical difficulties and manage security through our customer's firewall. This is the breadth of our operational services.

The security goes deeper than just the pipes, though. If a client chooses to run the Vio Digital Workflow Suite over their own pipes, we still offer an unsurpassed level of security.

First and foremost, we offer our clients' customers access to our customers' services over the Internet. No club membership needed here! At the core of Vio is a very secure private network to which our customers' workflow partners can easily access using Internet connections. Unlike VPNs which lack Quality of Service (QoS), Vio's private network runs over a shared infrastructure with QoS. We use Internet Protocol (IP) engineering and advanced peering techniques in a private environment to provide a highly efficient, totally secure and thoroughly resilient network-all the features you would expect for mission-critical online production workflows. This solution costs less than old-fashioned telecoms and is much more effective for our customers' needs.

We make sure all the traffic bound for a client's site comes through our firewalls into our cloud. We provide the bouncers on the door to make sure that the newly arrived guests do not become unruly. No one is able to force their way into any of our customers' operations. When a new file arrives in our cloud, we announce this to our clients, who then either physically copy the file from the cloud or specify that the Vio application perform this task automatically.

In either case, data transfer is a pull (not a push) into the client's network, keeping their local networks safe from intrusion from the sender.

WTT: Vio is a member of CIP4. How have organizations like this affected your JDF/XML initiatives

AD: Vio Worldwide chairs the CIP4 Asset Delivery Committee, and we sit on several other standards-setting bodies. Our commitment to CIP4 and JDF is total. We believe that these organizations are key to the success of these standards, as are organizations like DDAP, of which I am Immediate Past Chair. CIP4 makes sure that the standards are specified correctly and tests their interoperability. DDAP is a user organization that educates its members on the development of this kind of standards activity, encourages participation and collaborates on user requirements. This dedication to standards organizations extends to other members of Vio's management. For example, David Jones, CTO of Vio, is involved with the new JDF advertising committee and is also on the steering committee of AdsML, an XML standards body for advertising.

The involvement and dedication of organizations such as these are what makes JDF a success in the industry.

WTT: Would you fill us in on your partnership with Markzware and your preflight solution?

AD: The partnership with Markzware resulted in the industry's first JDF-based automated online preflight and delivery solution. UK-based RBI (Reed Business Information) and its prepress partner needed to be able to accept RBI's advertising data online after it had been preflighted. Essentially, the client brought together the two solutions providers (Vio and Markzware) to create a joint solution that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

The integration process was relatively simple, but the end result is anything but. We deliver a solution that preflights jobs at the sender's location. The system will not let a bad file (as defined by the receiver) leave the sender's environment. Only a good file-or a marginal one, at the sender's discretion-may leave. Any file sent from the sender's site comes with a Markzware JDF preflight report incorporated into the Vio JDF job ticket. This rich JDF metadata can then be used at the receiver's site for tracking, billing and even populating a CRM database to help understand where specific clients may need more help or training.

This provides our clients with an immense added value to their services for their clients.

WTT: Any industry with secure file transfer needs could be a target market for Vio-are you focusing on specific industries

AD: Our primary focus is the graphic arts market, which is our specialty. Truly understanding our customers' workflows and needs is key to providing them with valuable tools to bring together the right solutions.

Vio is, however, looking toward other markets, such as the entertainment and medical industries. Our corporate philosophy dictates that we fully understand a new market before we try to sell services and products to it. In short, today we have an immense amount of expertise on board to cover the graphic arts. In the future when the time is right, we will seek out similar teams of excellence to pursue other vertical market segments.

WTT: The services you offer include network provision and management, ISP and Internet management, and workflow, security, network and Internet consulting. It looks like Vio could be described as a systems integrator? Is that one of your core competencies?

AD: Although we do have systems integration skills, we are really services integrators in the way in which we bring supply chain capabilities to customers in the form of services in an integrated environment. No one has a supply chain if they do not have all the relevant routers and firewalls throughout working correctly. This is why we specialize in integrating the management and monitoring of the network with the management and monitoring of the applications and services.

Essentially, we act as inter-enterprise workflow consultants. We take relevant pieces of a sender's workflow and integrate it with a receiver's workflow. What makes us unique is the very nature of this business.

Think about it. If I am an ad agency, I will have partnerships with many publishers. If I am a publisher, I will have relationships with many ad agencies. This type of many-to-many relationship is the huge challenge to the integration of this industry, and Vio is solving this problem.

WTT: You've been with Vio for several months now, so tell us-where do you see the company going? What does the future hold?

AD: Hmmm… This is the $64,000 dollar question!

The simple answer is that, for the short term, you will see us selling a very efficient, secure and user-friendly open application in Vio's Digital Workflow Suite, which facilitates external digital workflows over the Internet, private or public networks, and supports standards such as JDF. In addition, attacking the vertical of network services and providing consultancy, to develop more flexible, secure and cost-effective ways to connect enterprises domestically and internationally.

In the long term, you will see an ever-increasing number of third-party applications being interfaced with the Vio Digital Workflow Suite. This will allow our clients to secure their businesses by re-engineering their workflows and adding value to their services, be that by offering unique services or by doing things better, cheaper and faster. Gone are the days where you could say quality, speed or price-pick two. There is room only for those companies that can offer all three.

I wouldn't be surprised if by DRUPA 2004 everyone and their brother will be offering JDF-enabled solutions. This just validates our belief that JDF is the right way to go. We offer a mature software solution that will take full advantage of the XML initiatives as they arrive-this will only increase our value to our clients.

Before I joined Vio, had I known that Vio had all these services available, it would have been part of the solution at my prepress shop. It has now fallen to me to make sure that Vio's capabilities do not remain a secret to the rest of the industry.

I'm excited about the opportunity to help Vio grow. Now is the time to help this industry get back on its feet as the economy begins to recover. Vio's products and services are just what we need to foster and speed this exit from the recession, and to do it in a way that makes the best possible business sense.

WTT: Thanks, Alan! Travel safely…