WhatTheyThink.com reported on April 13th, that Vio would cease operations by the end of the summer. Sources said the company had experienced significant losses and was unable to attract the needed funding to continue the operation. Scitex, who owned a portion of the Vio with British Telecom, said in February that they would divest of their shares in anticipation of a management buy out. An agreement was never reached.

Enter Citizen Limited: In early July, Vio’s future was assured following the sale of the company by BT and Scitex to Citizen Limited. Citizen now owns all Vio’s businesses throughout the world, including operations in the UK, France, Japan and the US, and will continue to trade under the very strong Vio brand that has been established in all those territories. Citizen, which has already raised funds to meet Vio’s ongoing capital requirements, also has alliances with key partners on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jonathan Cape is Group Managing Director and President of Vio. Cape was formerly Managing Director of Citizen Limited where he consulted to a company called Yava - an internet kiosk business serving the largest public house chains in the U.K. He was Commercial Director of Trinity Mirror Online Media. Trinity Mirror is one of the largest newspaper publishers in Europe. Cape headed the company’s internet efforts with 45 million page views each month.

Cape was also a Captain in the British Army and received his MBA from Temple University.

Please describe the new Vio – who is behind it now?

Vio is now owned by Citizen Limited, a media and technology consortium, in a deal that was completed on June 29, 2001. Citizen has assumed responsibility for all Vio’s businesses throughout the world, including operations in the UK, France, Japan and the US, and will continue to operate under the very strong Vio brand that has been established in all those countries.

The Citizen consortium is headed up by a team of media and technology specialists. Richard Horwood - Executive Chairman, David Jones - General Manager, and myself all previously held senior positions within the Trinity Mirror group, the largest newspaper publisher in the UK, and this gives us great insight into current and future customer requirements from having been a customer in the past. Dr. Larry Rafsky, president of US-based Acquire Media is the CTO, and a recognized leader in providing solutions for the intelligent distribution and syndication of digital media over the Internet, based on AMPS (Acquire Media Protocol Suite) technology with his team of developers in New Jersey and Salt Lake City. Miranda Clegg takes on the role of Managing Director Sales and Marketing bringing her industry knowledge to the group.

In addition, AssetHouse, a UK-based software company and shareholder in Citizen, brings the added skills and knowledge in offering media independent infrastructure solutions for content management and providing multi-channel services irrespective of content format or delivery.

Together we have the skills and vision to drive the company forward.

Tell our subscribers about the penetration Vio's products have within the market. How many users worldwide are still with Vio?

Vio is focusing its efforts on both reestablishing a core of the existing users, and also growing its user base in our four key territories. For the existing Vio product range we have started to work again in the UK with the main national newspapers, their pre–press partners, and several other main publishers and their printers, bringing together multiple core sites and also their satellite sites via their WANs. In France we have secured the majority of our customer base and in the first two weeks we are running network traffic at 80% of our previous highs. In Japan, we have also retained core customers. In the US, we are growing from the existing Acquire Media customer base of key newswire services, publishers and financial institutions. We will now use Acquire Media’s XML-based technologies to create the next version of Vio.

Customers in other parts of the world can use Vio services, via the Internet, as workflow partners of customers in our core countries. A number of our European customers outside the UK and France have remained with Vio to make use of this facility.

Explain your pricing model?

We have aligned ourselves with our customers and have restructured the business to provide a valuable tool to drive down communication costs and increase efficiency and functionality. Vio is network agnostic, allowing customers to utilize their existing communications infrastructure at no extra communications cost.

Our first major initiative has been to review the Vio pricing structure, a change widely welcomed by our customers. It was important that Vio allow customers to leverage their own bandwidth capacity. To reflect the real value of the Vio service, pricing is now available as an enterprise license at a known cost. Our fees are now fixed, based on the user’s level of activity and support requirements, classified as "large" /"medium"/"small medium"/or "small". This makes it easier for customers and Vio to budget and manage their businesses more efficiently. Existing and new customers can now use all the Vio options, and the 24x7 help desk, in the same license including: Send to Me, Extended Storage, Vio Your Service, Vio Command Line and Vio color managed remote proofing or printing solutions.

Send To Me enables customers to receive jobs from workflow partners via a "postbox" interface on their own Web site. This effectively enables each subscriber to work with an infinite community of workflow partners using the Vio service.

Extended Storage provides customers with the option of storing their jobs online on the Vio server for up to 30 days.

Vio Your Service utilizes dedicated lines to open up a customer’s Web-based in-house services to their customers free over Vio.

Vio Command Line allows script automation of workflows on a customers LAN or WAN.

Vio RemoteProof provides a color managed remote printing or proofing workflow from a Mac desktop as if users were printing to a local printer.

Vio will also continue to manage lease lines for companies, if they request it, but we are no longer subsidizing these lines. We offer lines at cost plus a management fee for our 24x7 proactive monitoring service, plus order and account management of the telecoms contracts and call-outs.

In addition, to help facilitate connection to workflow partners, in particular those at the receiving end only, an additional site license can be purchased at a reduced rate on the back of the main license.

What major challenges do you see in relation to current economic conditions?

All providers of products and services are finding the current economic environment challenging, but the basic principles of marketing apply – namely, if you have what the market wants and needs, they will buy it, and the last few months have highlighted what the real value of Vio was all about. We know that Vio and the new Vio with the Acquire Media technology has unique benefits and advantages over any other services available. This will help us successfully market the product. As long as we stay focused on the business that now brings us a positive contribution we know the future will be good for both our customers and ourselves and we will have the resources to invest in our joint futures.

Economic conditions affect any business; in times of economic slowdown, customers’ are naturally more cautious when making investment decisions and selecting new suppliers. However, Vio’s new business model is heavily focused on helping digital media businesses reduce the costs associated with data management and distribution, and content management, bringing about new workflow efficiencies. We are confident that Vio can enable customers to make savings in both their fixed and variable costs, thereby allowing us to grow our business in the current economic climate.

Our license structure enables our customers to outsource their network or workflow management to a team of people who understand their needs and will stay ahead of their requirements, saving our customers headcount, money and time.

Tell us about your staffing issues and how many employees you have?

Vio has refocused its activities and is now operating on a much lower cost base than before, but we have retained many of the sales and operational staff that are key to the success of the business. The Citizen consortium is currently made up of around 40 people, in-house, in 5 countries. In addition, we now have access to further resources in the consortium, including AssetHouse, numbering around 70 staff in total.

Vio is committed to retaining and employing a team of people who have a solid grounding in digital media and graphic arts, plus a deep understanding of the issues affecting businesses trying to establish and expand efficient digital distribution. At board level, all the key members of the new management team are media and technology specialists.

Specifically, what are you doing to bring Vio back to a leadership position?

Vio has a strong, well-established, proven service and a global brand. Our software and service are widely acknowledged in the market to be highly effective and user-friendly. Vio’s core competence has always been the reliable and responsive management of collaborative digital workflows throughout the printing and publishing industry, and this has not changed.

Vio now has a different, more transparent, and predictable pricing structure which has increased the appeal of Vio to many prospective customers.

Our customers recognize that Vio, coupled with its new technologies, will provide the most viable long-term solution utilizing the Internet. In general the business model has been adjusted and is now wholly compatible with our customers’ objectives to cut surplus production costs and make efficient use of existing telecommunications infrastructures, particularly the Internet, to solve their data transfer and management issues.

You have described some of the types of companies that work with Vio. Are they mostly publishing companies?

Vio’s services are primarily targeted at businesses involved in complex digital media production workflows, including publishers of newspapers, magazines, books and catalogues, prepress service providers, designers and agencies, and printers.

With the new suite of products and technologies from our partner companies, Vio now addresses the entertainment, financial services and news distribution industries as well as the graphic arts, print and publishing sectors.

Vio’s content management and digital media distribution expertise will also be of interest to corporate marketing departments, brand managers and packaging suppliers seeking to improve online control, access to and management of digital brand assets and marketing collateral.

Why would a customer consider Vio over other options in the market place?

The Vio expert staff, and Vio products with the Acquire Media technologies, add value to our customers by reducing their internal management costs, and improve their flexibility in configuring the communication bandwidth they have currently or plan to have in the future.

Vio is now focused on developing the added value of our services and software and not on heavily reselling and subsidizing telecommunications. Therefore, Vio now proactively helps reduce these costs for our customers while adding unique value in the new solutions we provide, guaranteeing customers secure collaborative production workflows distributed over the Internet.

The current Vio options offer unique workflow opportunities, in particular the Send To Me applet on a customer’s website provides an open "letterbox" without the requirement to preregister as a Vio user. Vio also offers extended online storage that provides backup off-site, and resilience for a monthly workflow.

Content management is a major challenge for most designers, publishers and document creators. How does AssetHouse and Vio work together here?

There are hundreds of content management solutions on the market to address different sector requirements. Customers should be at liberty to choose whichever is their preferred solution for managing content at the database and storage level. With AssetHouse, Vio can add a management layer over whatever the customer may choose themselves, to provide a media independent infrastructure solution for content management over a central or distributed database structure, and provide multi-channel services irrespective of content format or delivery. Whether or not Vio’s customers choose an AssetHouse solution, Vio now has the digital asset management expertise within the Citizen consortium to ensure a thorough understanding of our customers’ needs in this important area.

Tell us about your marketing strategy and how you secure most new accounts?

Once the initial service was established, and the brand awareness raised, our best salesmen were, and will continue to be, our own client base. Through word of mouth to their workflow partners, our customers have always been our most effective method of communicating the benefits of Vio. Many of our customers have encouraged their whole supply chain to work with Vio because it is secure, reliable and easy to use, and solved their production headaches. This effect is so strong, that the goodwill built by Vio in the past from the reliable and expert service we offered, our people and technology, has helped us rebuild Vio.

Vio was developed from the beginning by working with key customers, which then grew into regular user group meetings for eliciting feedback on what we were offering and should be developing in the future. In addition, key Vio executives have been regular participants in conferences and events worldwide, helping to educate the market on the issues surrounding digital distribution, and sharing ideas on how to move the industry forward. Numerous direct marketing campaigns and promotions have also been conducted to raise awareness of Vio’s services.

Explain your long-term funding plans to reach your goals.

Citizen now owns all Vio operations and assets worldwide and the necessary funds are in place to secure Vio's ongoing capital requirements. But the most important funding is from the new pricing plan ensuring customers recognize the value of the service and that Vio only undertakes profitable business from now on.

Much of the international infrastructure and staff costs worldwide have now gone, and are replaced by a more focused team and cleaner network design. The Internet enables Vio licensed services to be available on a global basis. We do not need to hold dedicated staff and connections in a multitude of countries.

Provide a confidence statement to assure companies that they will not have to go through what happened before.

The Citizen consortium has the expertise and resources to take Vio forward on an economically viable basis, and the management vision and technical skills to provide the market with cost-effective workflow solutions.

As part of Citizen, Vio has been restructured to reflect market needs and potential and, with new technologies in the group, to take control of the distributed digital media workflow, targeting only selected key territories with direct operations in the short term.

In the past three months Vio has scaled back significantly, the infrastructure and line costs have been reduced and in many countries eliminated, which provides a healthy platform for growth, without being loaded down with historic liabilities and unsustainable costs.

With our new partners’ technologies for managing distributed graphic arts workflows as well as other distributed digital media, and by supporting our customers’ chosen applications, we now have the right approach to satisfy customer needs, and ensure a healthy and sustainable business into the future.

Finally - What has been the major factor that companies like Vio did not factor in when building their business prior to now?

The industry, and the tools that serve it, have changed a great deal in the last four years. When Vio started, the Internet was still a developing infrastructure with poor performance for large media files, and Vio’s clients could only sensibly use dedicated lines. Whereas today, with advanced technology from expert suppliers like Acquire Media, the Internet, if approached properly, can be as robust and secure as dedicated circuits or VPNs.

Where we can, we will work with customers to drive down communications costs, using the public Internet securely and, where needs dictate, dedicated lines. The business is no longer based on selling or subsidizing telecoms lines.

Vio now has a new business model that reflects the industry we all work in today. Vio’s future services will follow clients’ needs and aspirations more closely, enhancing their ability to manage their distributed media workflows more effectively. Customer groups are now better prepared to adopt digital workflows and place real value on the services companies like Vio have to offer as it is expensive and difficult to retain these skills in-house.


Thank you very much Jonathan for explaining in detail the new Vio.