Xplor 2001, the Global Electronic Document Systems Conference & Exhibit, will be held October 28 through November 2, 2001 in Orlando, Florida. According to Xplor International, the event’s organizer, Xplor 2001 is the largest event that is focused solely on all aspects of document technology for business. It will host more than 250 exhibiting companies and occupy more than 350,000 square feet of exhibit space. Xplor 2001 will also provide significant educational opportunities for conference attendees. Over 250 sessions will explore and discuss a very wide range of topics, including web-based communications, one-to-one marketing, customer relationship management, variable data printing, and content management.

Xplor International describes itself as a worldwide association representing more than 5,000 members in more than 2,500 companies that develop or use the technologies and services of the document systems industry. Although Xplor International members come from a wide variety of industries, it is probably fair to say that the financial services industry (banks, brokerage firms, mutual fund companies, and similar organizations) and the insurance industry contribute a significant percentage of the association’s membership. Xplor International expects that these two industries will also supply a substantial number of attendees to Xplor 2001. What the financial services industry and the insurance industry have in common is the need to communicate with their customers on a regular and repetitive basis using printed documents as the primary medium of communication. These documents include statements, invoices, benefits summaries and similar communications, and, traditionally, such documents have been referred to as "transactional" documents to distinguish them from the promotional or marketing-related documents produced by the graphic arts industry.

As many WhatTheyThink.com members already know, WhatTheyThink.com has been selected as an official source for online coverage of Xplor 2001, and will include extensive coverage of the event on this site. I will be attending Xplor 2001, and I hope to provide a meaningful contribution to that coverage. My intention is to approach this conference and exhibit from the perspective of a participant in the graphic arts industry. I want to ask how the technologies that will be discussed and displayed at Xplor 2001 will affect the graphic arts industry and its participating firms. Based on my preliminary review of Xplor 2001’s educational sessions and exhibitor list, I strongly suspect that "convergence" will be the predominant underlying theme in most of my reports.

In an article published in the September 8, 2000 edition of The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems, Rab Govil and Dave deBronkart with PODi identified the convergence of promotional (i.e. graphic arts) printing and transactional printing as one of the "megatrends" that would affect the business of print in the immediate future. Govil and deBronkart noted that transactional documents were beginning to feature high quality personalized images and that promotional documents were beginning to feature printouts of relevant individual data. Govil and deBronkart also contended that this convergence would not necessarily bode well for the graphic arts industry:

"Graphic arts professionals, take note: This convergence is driven by the fact that transactional printing is already generated from a database. As the Seybold Reports have said over the past few years, one of the key limits to growth of personalized printing has been the difficulty of implementing database-driven activities in a graphic arts workflow."

"Graphic arts prepress people are often uncomfortable with databases, as are the designers who must conceive and design such campaigns. But nothing could be more natural to transactional people: data-driven printing is their bread and butter."

"Promotional printing may be higher quality, but if dealing with a database requires a lot of extra labor for one workflow and not for another, which one will win? Which evolution will be easier: improving the quality of transactional machines, or improving the database skills of prepress people?"

If the educational sessions that are scheduled for Xplor 2001 and the technologies that will be exhibited at Xplor 2001 are reliable indicators, the convergence of transactional printing and promotional printing is now well underway. And if this convergence continues to build momentum, it can fundamentally alter the competitive landscape of the graphic arts industry. By definition, an "industry" is a group of companies that produce products or provide services that are close substitutes for each other. As technologies and business processes evolve to permit transactional documents to provide the same or substantially the same functionality as promotional documents, the boundaries separating the graphic arts industry and the document systems industry may very well cease to exist in any meaningful way. Both the graphic arts industry and the document systems industry would then become part of a new, presumably larger, and yet to be named industry.

Such an industry transformation would have significant strategic implications for many participants in today’s printing/graphic arts industry. Printing companies, especially those that operate in the general commercial and direct mail segments of the industry, would find themselves in direct competition with an entirely new group of rivals. Because many transactional documents are printed internally by the companies that use the documents, many printing companies may also find that at least some of their customers have become their competitors. If less printing is outsourced, the need for traditional print buyers will likely be reduced. As more printing becomes database and template driven, fewer documents will be designed "from scratch" and this will impact the demand for creative services. Finally, direct marketing firms may see the demand for their services decline, as transactional documents become effective direct marketing documents.

It is still too early to determine whether or to what extent the convergence of transactional printing and promotional printing will produce the dramatic industry changes just described. But the potential implications of this convergence should remind us that industries are constantly evolving and that such evolution can fundamentally change the ground rules of competition in an industry. Xplor 2001 will showcase one evolutionary path for printed communications. It may not be the only possible evolutionary path, but it is one that graphic arts industry participants should thoroughly understand.