Tuesday June 12 -- CHICAGO-- In an effort to help commercial printers grow their digital printing business using the Canon imagePRESS C7000VP digital press, Canon U.S.A., Inc., today launched the imagePRESS Essential Business Builder Program. The program is a step-by-step approach to help printers develop the right "go-to-market" strategy for their new imagePRESS C7000VP digital press and help them become value-added solution providers.

From a basic level of helping printers with effective applications for short run On Demand printing to the more advanced and sophisticated direct marketing campaigns that utilize variable data and cross media solutions, Canon's Essential Business Builder program is designed to assist each printer, based on their individual needs and requirements.

"The Essential Business Builder Program will help demonstrate how an imagePRESS customer can best utilize the resources available, including the imagePRESS Workflow Solutions Program, to grow their business," said Janet Cain, director, Production Systems, Canon U.S.A. "The program consists of resources and tools that will help educate service providers on identifying customer opportunities for digital printing and equipping them with the right services and solutions to better serve new and existing customers."

The program incorporates a comprehensive set of tools to help print service providers transform their businesses:

- Business Self-Assessment Tool - Enables print service providers to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of their organization
- Gap Analysis Tool - Addresses any gaps or weaknesses that may exist in a printer's business and develop plans to overcome them
- Application Tool Set - Includes the full Marketing 4 Digital reports from PIA/GATF's Digital Printing Council, covering 24 key vertical markets
- Sales Strategies Tool Set - Demonstrates how to approach customers and prospects with solutions and add measurable improvements to the printed page, and incorporates realistic application solutions ranging from simple static jobs to complex cross media campaigns.

In addition, Canon will be offering an on-site mentoring component of this program, through which, imagePRESS customers will have direct access to seasoned digital printing business development experts who specialize in Business Planning, Sales Marketing, Production and Workflow.

The Essential Business Builder Program joins the imagePRESS Workflow Solutions program, complementing the use of the imagePRESS C7000VP digital press. imagePRESS Workflow Solutions is a collection of Canon branded and third-party hardware and software solutions that focus on key workflows in production printing environments to maximize efficiencies, and help printers build complete solutions using the imagePRESS C7000VP digital press.

imagePRESS Brand: Revolutionizing the World of Digital Production Printing

Poised to revolutionize digital printing, the imagePRESS line of digital presses deliver the look and feel of offset print for short-run and production color applications affordably. Ranging from color business document applications and critical design proofs to collateral material and reprints, the imagePRESS C1 digital color press produces high quality output at speeds of up to 14 pages-per-minute (ppm) for color and up to 60ppm for black-and-white, based on letter-sized output. The imagePRESS C7000VP digital press, which will begin shipping to customers this quarter, delivers consistent print speed at 70ppm for letter-sized output in color regardless of the weight of the media combining productivity with offset image quality output.

"The introduction of the Canon imagePRESS C7000VP changes the balance within the digital production color market as it signals the entry of a recognized color market leader with a heritage of market success and strong distribution channels," said Jim Hamilton, director, InfoTrends. "The pairing of the imagePRESS C7000VP with the imagePRESS C1 digital press introduces a combination that is unique in this segment. The imagePRESS products can provide consistency of output for a variety of production requirements."

The imagePRESS C7000VP is currently installed at several beta sites, including Micropage, a New York City-based commercial printer. According to Brian Boyajian, director, Sales and Marketing, Micropage, "The color accuracy that we are seeing produced by the imagePRESS is excellent and far superior to previous digital presses we have used. When a gallery or design firm has come in and requested offset, we've shown samples run on the imagePRESS and the customer agreed on the quality and asked that we run the job on the imagePRESS over offset. Since March of this year, we have run more than 400 paying jobs on the imagePRESS consisting of more than 410,000 impressions."