(Watch David Zwang’s interview with Four Pees’ Tom Peire here.)

Print continues to evolve to keep up with the changes in markets and technologies. While there are lots of changes, the bottom line outcome is that run lengths are trending downward, even to a quantity of one. To better support these new realities, business and production processes need to change, and the cloud is a great facilitator.

In our connected world, we rarely see orders that are not delivered through the cloud by email, W2P, FTP solutions, EDI, etc. We are also seeing a lot of business and production software tools moving to cloud-based subscription services. Moving business and production workflows to the cloud would save hardware and maintenance cost, a lot of file transfer time up and down, and, more importantly, decrease the total time needed to get the approved order to the output device. This savings is especially critical if you are providing order of “one” mass customization services.