Scott Seebass is CEO and Chief Engineer of Xinet, Inc. He has been a leader in the computer networking world since 1989 when - at the age of 20 -- he co-authored the Unix System Administration Book, now a standard university textbook in its third edition. He conducts seminars and participates in panels at leading trade shows, such as Print '01, Seybold San Francisco, MagazineTech and the Gutenberg Festival. Prior to 1991 when he co-founded Xinet, Inc., which now has offices in Berkeley, California and Munich, Germany, he worked at mt Xinu on MORE/bsd, mt Xinu's commercial version of Unix. Scott has written many articles appearing in the trade press and is frequently quoted by journalists seeking his straightforward, opinionated views on the industry. He holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in Computer Science and Statistics.

Xinet, Inc., with headquarters in Berkeley, California and a subsidiary in Munich, Germany, develops high-performance networking software that seamlessly integrates workgroups and a central server. Incorporated in 1991 after five years as the network software division of mt Xinu, Xinet has focused its engineering expertise on creating flexible and efficient workflows in publishing and prepress environments. Whenever graphic files require continuous transfer between server, workstation, and output device, Xinet's prepress software maximizes throughput and minimizes network traffic, helping customers improve production and increase profitability.

Scott - FullPress and WebNative - who uses these products?

FullPress, our pre-press server product, has wide penetration into most large organizations throughout the world that do commercial printing, pre-press and packaging.

WebNative, our web asset management system, also has penetration into those markets, as well as advertising agencies, in-house design shops, publications -- anyone who deals with lots of images and needs to distribute them over the Internet. For our traditional networking products, we have hundreds of thousands of users. Each of our server installs serve scores of users at internal sites.

When you start counting WebNative users, you factor in our clients' clients, and the numbers get large and hard to count. The breakdown of where our products are sold worldwide fluctuates with the quality of the economy, but overall it's about 40 percent in Europe, 40 percent in the U.S. and 20 percent in Asia.

Do you price your services to daily users of the software or is it a one “sale deal?”

We are not an ASP, so we don't price services to the end-user. We sell boxed software and let our users decide how to price it to their clients. We found that our users take advantage of having a fixed cost for their operations by pricing depending on their customers' needs and the situation. Some good customers may pay nothing for the service. Others may pay a per meg/per month service, or some may pay by the click or by the download. It all depends on the kind of service they're offering the customer and what the customer is getting from that service.

What is your take on the economy and the overall changes in the print industry. How can small shops survive?

The current economic conditions are reducing the demand for services in an industry where growth is already sluggish. The demand for printing, pre-press and advertising is decreasing, and at the same time, the industry is fighting with over-capacity. That means there is more capacity and less demand, which means the companies that are efficient and have low overhead are going to take work away from the companies that are inefficient and have high overhead.

We expect to see a lot of business failures across the whole spectrum:
- small shops who can't compete with better capitalized shops;
- small parts of the industry that will disappear entirely, such as standalone service bureaus,
- a general transition from many small and relatively inefficient operations to fewer, bigger, more efficient operations who can provide better services at a lower price.

We have not seen a huge effect from the slowing economy because we sell a product that saves money and increases efficiency to the high end of the market that understands the value of becoming more efficient and still has capital to invest in solutions that provide good ROI. Companies that cater to other segments of the market, especially to the low-end, are in dire straits. We also have a well-balanced distribution of our sales around the world, so the sluggish U.S. economy is cushioned by foreign sales.

Have you experienced any layoffs during these tough times?

No, we've never had any layoffs in our 10-year history and we don't intend to start.

Are you a profitable business?

Xinet is privately held and profitable, and we don't see any reason that that would change in the future. We've been profitable since our first quarter in 1991.

Do you worry about your competition and the many players trying to find a niche in the publishing workflow business?

In the production server market we don't really see any truly viable competitors. In the digital asset management market, it depends on the type of the service and what the customer wants. No one is offering the exact product offering we have. No one can do all the things that we can do. Conversely, there are products that can do things that our product cannot do. And some of those things we don't think are important and some of those things we intend to implement when we can marshal the appropriate engineering resources to complete them.

As for competitors, in small markets, it's Canto, in MIS-driven markets, we see Telescope and a handful of others, and in the high-end market, we compete with companies that are really offering custom-software masquerading as products.

The field we are in was actually much more crowded when we entered it. By producing a better product and providing better service to the customers, we were able to remove other competitors from the market.

That's even more true in the digital asset management field where there are numerous competitors, most of them without a really viable product. We have always prided ourselves on innovation and careful product control and design. We try to build a product that works better, more reliably and more efficiently. We spend a lot of money on R&D and we spend a lot of money on process control to ensure that our product works correctly all the time.

Does Xinet have only very large companies as customers?

Our customer base has traditionally been the high end of the market: large sites with hundreds of operators on site and thousands of customers. In the last few years we have begun to supply our products on smaller, lower-end operating systems, such as NT and Mac OS X, so we've seen an increase in smaller shops, but that's been countered by the definite decrease in the number of smaller shops in the world.

Content management - is the need for solutions here just advertising hype or is there a real need for massive, custom solutions?

In most cases, content management systems end up trying to solve a bigger problem than what really exists. Most people already know a considerable amount about their work, and how and what they want - it is just a matter of finding it and retrieving it efficiently. Our products are targeted more on the production side of things: where are the jobs, when were they used, and how do I get them back and used again. A lot of the approaches to this problem have been the "try to hit a fly with a sledgehammer" approach, where there's so much going on that the overhead of trying to manage the content exceeds the value of having it better managed.

How do you generate support for your products and gain feedback for future releases?

The best way to generate support for our products is to make good products, listen to our customers, understand their problems and generate solutions to the problems they have today. We spend a lot of time talking to our customers. We have a very extensive system to track every issue with our software and every feature request we receive. We count those requests and talk to our customers to understand their needs and make software based on what solves their needs, not based on what some marketing person decides will be the next best thing.

What’s happening at Print 01?

Our big product releases coming out at Print '01 are enhancements to our FullPress server product and our digital asset management product, WebNative. FullPress version 11.0 incorporates PDF seamlessly into our customer's existing workflows, allowing them to bring PDF files in, view them on the web, produce PDF files, and use PDF in the same way you can use other file formats -- such as PostScript and TIFF -- in their previous workflows. We've tried to make working with PDF as easy for our customers as their existing workflows.

On the digital asset management front, our big advance is WebNative Venture, which includes a built-in and fully integrated SQL database into our existing WebNative product. WebNative Venture allows faster searching, the ability to associate metadata with any object on your server and automatic tracking of everything that goes on within the production workflow.