BOULDER, CO--Nov 1, 2007 - InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, today announced continued global expansion, with an expanded workforce throughout the world and high profile customer wins globally. InfoPrint has now expanded to cover 15 regions across 4 geographies since its launch on June 1, 2007 operating in 36 countries worldwide.
This continues the company's aggressive drive to become the leading provider of output solutions, based on a combination of innovation in technology, global presence and local knowledge. An expanded sales team will further allow InfoPrint to reach new markets and opportunities globally, alongside operations staff to manage customer relations in country.
"Our investments in innovation, color and services continue to strengthen our leadership in output solutions," said Bob Kilcullen, Senior Vice President, Product Marketing, InfoPrint. "We have seen two consecutive quarters of strong growth since the company was launched, particularly in emerging markets. With the ongoing support of a strong parent like Ricoh and our heritage and experience in the industry through IBM, we are committed to innovation, meeting customers' needs and strengthening our production print portfolio."
Recent global InfoPrint customer wins include CDMS, one of the UK's leading marketing services providers who installed new InfoPrint production print solutions and workflow management. This new output environment enables CDMS to offer its customers a direct marketing service with a choice of integrated communications channels across email, mail and text message, depending on customers' preferences and previous behavior. Littlewoods, the UK's largest home shopping and multi-channel retailer, is one of the first CDMS customers looking to take advantage of this offering.
In the US, 21st Century Insurance Group has implemented a complete end-to-end workflow management solution in conjunction with InfoPrint, to improve printed customer communications integrity by tracking each individual mail piece through the complete print to mail process. The auto-insurance giant replaced cut-sheet with high-speed continuous forms printers and new file-based inserters that reduced print run times while automating the tracking and reporting of each step of the entire operation. Also in North America, IWCO Direct continues to work with InfoPrint to support growing demand for specialized direct mail programs, such as trigger mailings and response management services.
Demonstrating ongoing technology excellence
InfoPrint continues to demonstrate leadership in color with the recent launch of AFP models of its InfoPrint 5000 addressing the requirements for speed, quality, reliability and ease of use for transactional printers, service bureaus, direct mailers and book printers with AFP, PostScript, or PDF color applications. The new AFP models support the open industry-standard AFP color management architecture published by the AFP Consortium (www.AFPColor.org) to provide accurate, consistent, and device-independent color rendering. These new models use a powerful and scalable InfoPrint Solutions cluster-based printer controller that can drive parallel AFP or Adobe PostScript RIPS and deliver high-speed printing to meet customer needs, using IBM's POWER5 technology and IBM blade technology. InfoPrint 5000 applications can be driven by InfoPrint ProcessDirector or InfoPrint Manager.
InfoPrint's focus is on providing output solutions to create business advantage and enable the creation of dynamic digital output. InfoPrint's output software solutions provide centralized management of printers and print jobs. Models of all sizes benefit from the sharing of leading-edge technologies and innovation, such as RFID-enabled InfoPrint machines to optimize supply chain operations.