I'm Barb Pellow, group director at Infotrends.  One of the big trends that we’re seeing in the marketplace today is movement of services to the cloud.  In fact, projections are that by the time you get to 2013 cloud-based services will compose about 150 billion dollar business.  The printing industry is no exception.  As companies look at the complexity of some of the services offerings that they need to deliver to customers what we’re seeing is that they’re becoming more and more dependent on providers that are moving those services into a software-as-a-service business model. 

I look around at companies like MindFire, XMPie, Pageflex and what they’re trying to do is mitigate that cost of delivery of those services so that more print service providers can in fact offer those capabilities to customers.  What they’re doing is they’re blending in web to print, cross media communications, integrating social media, blending in text-based services, integrating with quick response codes and making those available affordably while minimizing the amount of IT staff that the service provider actually needs to invest in. 

I think it’s time for all of us to look around and look to the cloud.