The end of last year, December 8, 2003 - to be exact- WhatTheyThink.com last checked in on NGP and CIP4. There have been some new developments since then. On February 12th, Roger Graham, Creo’s Market Communications Manager, Networked Graphic Production (NGP), confirmed to WTT that “Printcafe is no longer an NGP Partner.” For details, WTT spoke to Marc Olin, VP/General Manger Commercial Print Systems, EFI, and Creo’s Mark Anderson, Product Marketing Manager, NGP.

EFI (Printcafe)
EFI has not resigned from NGP Partners, according to Marc Olin “we have not sent a resignation letter and we did not resign,” but the company did choose not to sign the membership agreement circulated last fall prior to Graph Expo. While Printcafe (now part of EFI) was one of the first companies participating in NGP Partners, the new agreement drew out issues EFI’s legal department felt were too competitive. “We didn’t understand why we needed to sign a new agreement right when our merger with EFI occurred when we had been an NGP member from its inception”.

While EFI planned on remaining a member of NGP Partners, they do prefer to work on interoperability conformance specifications (ICSs) through the CIP4 MIS Working Group, and that is where EFI has been putting their effort. “It doesn’t make sense to develop the specifications in two places,” said Marc. “We don’t feel that activity should happen outside CIP4.” His feeling is that the interoperability efforts of the NGP Partners should be rolled into CIP4’s MIS Working Group, and NGP Partners should remain a marketing group. “The MIS working group inside CIP4 has been functioning very effectively as a group and many of the NGP members are part of this committee including Creo and Xerox.”