Technology Outlook: Software and Workflow

Heidi Tolliver-Walker recaps WhatTheyThink’s recent Technology Outlook webinar on software and workflow in which Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee looked at the trends and technology introductions in this category.

For this What They Think webinar, held August 14 during Technology Week, Pat McGrew (The McGrew Group) teamed up with Ryan McAbee (Pixel Dot Consulting) to discuss software and workflow, largely in the context of drupa. What stood out to the pair was, in addition to a lot of hardware we don’t normally see (such as packaging, wide-format, and label hardware), the show saw a lot of software in the booths, as well. Lots and lots of software.

“What stood out to me is that—primarily vendors, the key brands—were slammed,” observed McAbee. “Attendees were actively trying to see what new technology and solutions sets were coming on, powered by software and further automation linking software and equipment.”

Cozy Booth Partners

What stood out to McGrew was how many hardware vendors were co-presenting with their design and software partners. “One of the things that that always gets my attention is who's in whose stand,” she says. “Because a lot of software vendors, when they come to a big show like this, make decisions about whether to take a stand on their own or go with their partners. This time we saw a lot of vendors co-locating in each other’s stands. Offset, flexo, digital, and wide-format—they all had a lot of design partners, software and workflow automation partners, with them.”

Fueling these cozy relationships, McGrew and McAbee observed, is a bit of a foot race between the digital press manufacturers and the analog manufacturers. With press speeds—both digital and analog—at blazing levels, you need to automate as much of the file creation and pre-press steps as you can.

“We're going into this new era where the vendors have largely optimized the easy things to optimize on the equipment in terms of automation,” says McAbee. “Now you're having to look for those opportunities elsewhere. You've probably seen some of the charts out there that 55% or so of the time [spent on the job] is outside of production. So it's the bookends, if you will— the getting the file ready and then getting it to where it needs to go—where the innovation is coming from.”

Key Software Trends to Watch

Primary software trends coming out of the show for printers to watch?

Front end-automation
Back-end automation
Movement to the cloud
Incorporation of AI (especially in profiling and machine management)
Growth in print buying platforms
Workflow collaborations

But it’s really in the collaborations where the trends speak the loudest. “In terms of software, we went through that period of time where vendors tried to ‘own’ their solutions from beginning to the end, and they found that it’s a hard thing to do,” says McAbee. “Now we've seen vendors taking more the approach of integration with strategic partners that offer something that they, themselves, do not. It’s this aspect of collaboration that we really saw on display.”

What’s It Mean for Printers?

What does this mean for printers? McAbee concludes: “Look for systems that are open that can communicate with others and have the protocols to do that, whether it's through database connections, APIs, or JDF/JDMF, which is still used in a lot of the ground with the equipment in our industry. Then you want to look to see those partners have a lot of other partners in their ecosystems that they're collaborating with, because that means a more turnkey integration for you.”

To view the entire webinar, including detailed insights from the drupa show floor, click here.