Cisco, Xerox and Cloud Printing

Back in January, at the Consumer Electronics Association's venerable CES show, an “Innovation Power Panel" took place, featuring Cisco CEO John Chambers, GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt, and Xerox Chairman and CEO Ursula Burns. Among other topics, the CEOs talked about how their respective companies innovate. Things like decentralized management; investing in R&D, focusing on human resources and shortening their time to market for new products. Perhaps after the session, the two vendors and their big customer got together to talk about the difficulty of printing in the enterprise today.

Last month, Cisco Systems and Xerox announced that they would partner to create a mobile printing system, to allow users to print from any device to any printer. The uniqueness of this announcement is that, while virtually “everyone” is now talking about making printing easier for mobile employees, no one is really talking about the underlying network and infrastructure, which is Cisco's forte, and the system integration necessary to make it happen, which is clearly a strength that Xerox brings to the table with the powerful capabilities the ACS acquisition provides.

Unless you are a serious tech geek, you probably haven’t even heard of Cisco's UCS (Unified Computing System), which is a key hardware and software component to the relationship. Cisco’s very extensive network of channel partners will resell the technology and a managed service that will be delivered from a Xerox data center.

According to the announcement, which focused on mobile printing, an employee can send a document from a smartphone, tablet or other device to a Cloud service that will make that document available to any printer in an organization. The employee can go to one of those printers, punch in the code for that document, and have it printed out.

This isn’t a particularly earth-shattering revelation. Several other companies have extolled the virtues of this kind of capability for at least a couple of years. Last month, I talked about PrintMe, which is a Cloud service from EFI that provides remarkably similar functionality. Furthermore, roughly two years ago I attended an HP event in NYC that described exactly this, focusing on HP’s enterprise print server and a concept they called “pull printing”, albeit without reference at the time to mobile applications.

However, the combination of the resources of Cisco and Xerox definitely can help address the growing issues of printing associated with mobile devices and virtual desktops in far-flung enterprise deployments. It shouldn’t be hard for an employee to print, no matter where they are. But alas, today it can be quite difficult.

We've all done it "the hard way". The typical method for getting a document printed from a mobile device is to email it to someone who sits near a printer and have them print it out. This is both cumbersome and time-consuming, and in many companies, introduces document security risks. In fact, in many organizations, there still is no “guest” network access, so even sending the email from a laptop or mobile device to a local user can be challenging, unless you have an aircard or something.

Xerox introduced their Mobile Printing System last year, which I’ve discussed in previous posts, but seemed to leave it up to enterprises or third-party system integrators to deploy and configure.

According to the partnership announcement, the companies will build print agents into Cisco routers and switches, starting with the ISR (Integrated Services Router.) They will use Cisco's wide-area network acceleration products to help print jobs travel faster, and Cisco security tools to make sure information doesn't end up in the wrong hands, the announcement said.

Cisco and Xerox will deliver the mobile printing capability in three products. Xerox Managed Print Services (MPS) over Cisco Borderless Networks is a software product from Xerox that provides the tools for an enterprise to implement mobile printing services to its own employees. The software, which takes advantage of IOS (Internetwork Operating System) on Cisco network equipment, provides the security, WAN optimization and print monitoring for mobile printing. Cisco channel partners will also be able to use Xerox MPS to offer these services to enterprises. Xerox MPS should be offered through Cisco channel partners in the U.S. starting in July or August and in Europe next January.

Xerox Cloud ITO Services is a set of services, including mobile printing, that Xerox will offer to enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses. The services grow out Xerox's acquisition of ACS. They will run on Xerox data centers built with Cisco's UCS servers and the Vblock infrastructure made up of Cisco networking and computing, EMC storage and VMware virtualization software. These services will also be sold through Cisco's channels. They are available on a limited basis now and are likely to be generally available next January, the companies said.

There will be client software for Cisco's Cius tablet and for Cisco Virtualization Experience Client devices, which is installed on desktop computers. This Xerox Mobile Print Solution will allow users of those clients to securely print documents on any printer in the enterprise.

In summary, this partnership appears to glue together a number of important pieces for enterprise Cloud printing into a complete hardware, software and services offering that previously would have required enormous amounts of labor and expense for customers contemplating enterprise deployments. Cisco and Xerox's ACS acquisition have long been partnered, with ACS being a top Cisco reseller for many years. Stay tuned for more as deployments begin to roll-out.

More on PrintMe, and Xerox Cloud Mobile Print

Over at Whattheythink.com today, another great video interview by Cary Sherburne with Toby Weiss, EFI Fiery GM. Cary must have been very busy at Connect, I bet we're going to see many hours of great footage over the next few weeks! Good stuff.

The new interview, which you can see here, has additional information about PrintMe that I hadn't heard prior to writing my post last week.

Notably, Toby says that Xerox MFPs (Multi-Function Peripheral/Printer) are "out of the box" capable of working directly with PrintMe (which we discussed here last week) via the Xerox Extensible Interface Platform (EIP). Xerox describes EIP as "a software platform upon which developers can use standard web-based tools to create server-based applications that can be configured for the MFP’s touch-screen user interface." For detailed information, visit the Xerox EIP page.

Xerox describes many applications for EIP besides printing. Enterprise applications like searching a client database or submitting forms to corporate departments; configuring personal preferences for output by swiping an ID badge, or scanning documents into a enterprise document management system. They also speak of the applications HP has promoted so heavily recently, like printing the news or stock reports off the Internet directly via interacting with the Xerox MFP touch-screen.

While we're on the subject of mobile printing and the Xerox MFP interface, check out this video demo from an event almost a year ago in Amsterdam. This Xerox Mobile Print interface, which appears to use this EIP technology, sounds more like HP ePrint by virtue of being based on email, than like PrintMe. Cool demo, though. It shows a lady (customer? XRX employee? shill?) who appears to have just walked up to the stand and prints something from her Blackberry, with no advance preparation. She's excited!

My next post is likely to be regarding the recent Xerox/Cisco announcement. I want to say that Xerox is getting very aggressive, and it does appear they are going to leverage all their relationships in this area. It's kind of funny, though, that HP and Google have gotten all the buzz, and here's Xerox demoing stuff a year ago that quite frankly very few people have heard about.

It may well be a factor of the level of embrace of the developer community-- Google gets thousands of bright people (i.e., software developers) to generate grass roots publicity, by making things "open". With XRX, it seems like you kind of have to be Cisco or SAP (or I guess EFI now) to participate in their ecosystem.

EFI PrintMe Emerges From Obscurity

Those of you who read this blog on a fairly regular basis may know that David and I have written a bit on the subject of mobile printing, notably from Smart Phones and Tablets. Our colleague Kin Lane, who is Mimeo's API Evangelist, joined forces with us this past winter to write a paper for TAGA, the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts, that provides an inventory of Cloud Printing technologies. The paper is primarily focused on Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print and HP ePrint, which are clearly the leaders in this area. That "semi-academic" treatise will be published in the TAGA 63rd Annual Technical Conference Proceedings, which will come out later in the summer. You can contact TAGA if you want a copy of it.

In addition to the things the "big three" are developing in this area, there are quite a few other smaller companies developing Cloud Printing technology and capabilities, and one we felt we had to at least mention in our paper was EFI. Unlike the three companies mentioned, EFI is not known for doing much in the mobile arena. But EFI actually invented the idea that has become the mobile component of "Cloud Printing", way back during the "dot com" era. They didn't use the term Cloud, because it hadn't been coined yet. Instead, they gave it a "fun dotcom" name, PrintMe. I'd venture to say that most people who ever knew about PrintMe don't know that it has continued to exist over the years since it's announcement in October 2001.



PrintMe was literally 10 years ahead of its time. It partnered EFI with leading companies like Adobe, who actually provided a button in Acrobat reader that connected to PrintMe, Sir Speedy, Xerox, and Yahoo, as well as early hotel Internet provider STSN (now iBAHN), and even Mimeo.com. For several reasons, including timing, the service never became as ubiquitous as would have befitted its innovative nature.

Perhaps in another post, we'll talk about all the reasons why PrintMe didn't achieve world domination the first time out, but let's focus on today and the future here. With the new excitement around the Cloud, and the emerging need for printing on mobile devices, it makes sense that EFI would restart marketing and make new investments in the development of this platform.

Originally, Printme was brought to market by a separate "Enterprise" team at EFI, with its own GM, etc. Today, according to a recent update from Cary Sherburne at Whattheythink.com, the technology is part of the Fiery group, led by Senior Vice President Toby Weiss. This should mean it will garner more resources, and be able to leverage EFI's world-leading technology, more than in the past 10 years.

In a press release from the original launch, PrintMe was described as “the first complete Internet printing solution that enables remote printing without requiring print drivers, cables or complex setup.” The company further described the solution as enabling "users to print documents from their personal computers, personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, two-way pagers and even cell phones by simply “dialing” in to any printer on the PrintMe Network.”

EFI has always been very forward-looking, and PrintMe is no exception. It was launched literally a decade ahead of its time. The message in that press release from so long ago is pretty much exactly what Google and HP are talking about in their Cloud Printing initiatives today. EFI could re-launch the service and pretty much just copy and paste the original press release into PR Newswire, with few edits!

PrintMe now appears to be poised to fulfill its original promise. A user sends their "print job" to PrintMe Cloud, and obtains a code which allows them to retrieve their output on a PrintMe enabled printer. This is similar to how other technologies are doing this now, although the need for a user to have a unique "code" that identifies their job, and requiring them to remember and enter that code somewhere is absent from other developer's implementations.

A unique feature of PrintMe is that it has a hardware component for the output device. EFI today says that "terminals" can be purchased for almost any copier/printer and can also be embedded in Fiery controllers. According to EFI, this makes the service brand agnostic, and allows it to work with any output device. Frankly I was surprised to read that this "feature" of the original service is still being offered today. In a world where every device is Internet-connected, and Printers have web browsers and touch screens, it seems a bit unnecessary and expensive to have additional hardware attached to a printer. Google Cloud Print, for example, offers similar support for legacy printers and can be supported with a tiny piece of software that can be embedded into any printer, as well. That same code snippet extends Google Cloud Print to other applications, as well, including opening it up to commercial printing applications-- something else EFI dabbled with back in the early days.

PrintMe is an enduringly cool idea and I am really looking forward to EFI's progress in this area. I hope they make the appropriate level of investment to get this adopted broadly because it is a huge opportunity. They invented this, and they deserve to capitalize on it. There is much more competition now from big companies who are similarly extremely innovative like EFI, so the bar has been raised.

EFI has proven over the years they are a tough competitor, so it's going to be interesting to see what they do!

Lulu API Launches

I read a press release early this week that Lulu.com's API, which delivers it's Open Publishing Platform is now ready for prime time with the addition of two major components.

Lulu's APIs enable publishers, Website builders and entrepreneurial content owners to easily publish the books they and their authors have created. According to Lulu, their Open Publication APIs enable publishers, businesses and developers to create Web applications, powered by Lulu, and marketed under their own brand names.

The first of two final components of the API program is a Document Conversion API, that converts Word, RTF and HTML document into print-ready PDF files. The second is a new E-Commerce API. This will allow developers to place orders with Lulu on behalf of their users, programmatically. This will enable their partners to sell their books from their own web sites.

Bruce Watermann Talks About Blurb.com Technology

Blurb is an online “self-publishing” company based in San Francisco. The company launched their first products in 2006. I had seen Eileen Gittins, the company’s founder, speak at DSCOOP6 a couple of months ago, so I was thrilled to see Bruce Watermann was appearing on a panel at the Digital Book Printing Forum in New York last week.

Bruce is the company’s SVP, Print Operations. He’s been there since 2005. Before joining Blurb, he worked at Corbis, and before that at a high end photo lab in Seattle, Pacific Color.

Bruce started out with some of the company’s current “vital statistics”, telling us that their annual revenue is now over $50M, and that in 2010, they paid nearly $2M to authors. Almost 50% of the company’s business now originates outside of the US. They have a London office, in addition to SF HQ. They ship to 70 countries, and they’ve just recently begun to localize their web site, starting with French in 2010, and more to come this year. Bruce explained they are very careful about the translations, so they get the nuances of the culture and communicate their brand value in the locality.

But let’s talk about the fun part, the technology. Bruce built a really cool digital network for producing the many products consumers purchase on the company’s web site. They call it the Print Partner Network, or PPN.

The print service providers in the PPN are handpicked. Once an order/job “lands” at one of the PPN companies, they have three days to produce and ship it. Blurb expects less than 1% manufacturing defects, and enforces this with an SLA. Bruce tells us this is being achieved!

The company insists their partners use 100% HP Indigo digital presses for color, and 100% Oce equipment for B&W when producing Blurb products. In the network, partners have Indigo 5000 series, 7000s and 7500s, as well as WS6000s and W7200s. They have even standardized RIPs, insisting on HP SmartStream Ultra or Production Pro.

Bruce told us, however, that the actual printing is “the easy part”. I think most printers would agree with this— when a job is on the press, you’re making money, it is smooth sailing. It’s everything before and after that kills you. Because of this, Bruce told us that the beyond being able to print with the highest quality, the thing that separates the partners they have chosen is Information Technology (IT) expertise, particular binding equipment and skills, and being able to fulfill a quantity of one.

Getting the jobs to the PPN partner consists of three files: XML (job ticket), book cover, book guts. They use the venerable PrintTalk specification (now part of CIP4 JDF, but formerly an industry e-commerce spec originally developed as a standalone consortium in the dotcom era.) Blurb decides where the job will be printed. One ready, the PPN partner pulls the job down to their facility.

Finishing is also standardized, with Blurb requiring partners to utilize ODM and GP2 binding gear; CP Bourg and Horizon for book block creation, and LBS for materials. As an aside, the paper is also dictated, with Blurb working exclusively with NewPage and Mohawk at this time.

Printers are able to dictate their own internal workflow, but fulfillment is prescribed by Blurb, featuring a global shipping partnership with FedEx. Bruce said they hit their high water mark one day in 2010 when they shipped 10,000 packages in a single day!

Self-publishing consumers in their own homes and offices use one of three separate methods to create their books: BookSmart is a desktop client, Bookify is an online creator application, and PDF to Book provides templates for Adobe InDesign. Customers then send their ready-to-publish creations over to Blurb.

Blurb’s creation tools plug into a RESTful API interface that provides pricing, preview, preflight and plugs into e-commerce functionality. From there, the orders flow into a business layer, and then finally into Blurb’s backend system, which they call “BookServe”, that provides routing and other services.

It’s really damn exciting stuff. I consider companies like Blurb, and Lulu (see my recent post about Bob Young’s talk at the Digital Book Printing Forum) to be part of the “new printing industry”, a group in which I also include my own employer, Mimeo.com.

In my opinion, our industry would have a much more vibrant ecosystem if more companies were doing the things we are doing. We’d be able to attract better talent, and explain our place in the digital media landscape much better if more participants had the tech capabilities and the ability to explain those capabilities, like Bruce Watermann did at this event.

Lulu Founder & CEO Bob Young keynotes the Digital Book Printing Forum 2011

Most stories on the blogs and Internet news feeds I read that pay any attention at all to the publishing world are focused on eBooks. Not particularly surprising, since I mostly read tech blogs. So I was thrilled to learn that while the eBook world is growing incredibly rapidly—and the growth is accelerating—the vast majority of books are still printed on paper. Of particularly more interest to me is that the percentage of books printed “on demand”, or digitally in small (less than 10,000) quantities, is very small, but also growing very rapidly. Not as fast as eBooks, but at a good clip. So it’s a robust segment of the printing business, and I like that.

Last Tuesday, April 5^th, I attended the Digital Book Printing Forum in New York. I’d never attended this event before and one big draw for me was Bob Young, who I recognized as the CEO of RedHat (the Linux company.) Bob was previously not someone I associated with the book business. I’m very glad I attended. I really enjoyed his talk. Here is some of what I captured. Bob is also the Founder and CEO of Lulu, a company founded in 2002 that continues to pioneering in the publishing and book business. According to the company's website, more than 1.1 million creators from more than 200 countries and territories have signed up them.

It was a small room at the Marriott Marquis, probably held about 200 people. But before Bob came on to give the keynote, the room was full. I was somewhat surprised, but it wasn't a high cost event, a one-day thing, and NYC is certainly a place where the topic of book printing is still popular.

Bob didn’t have slides. He started out by telling us a very “down home” kind of founding story about Lulu, telling us about how he started the company sort of on a whim in his wife's knitting closet. He further explained to the audience that “he's not a data guy”, so he can’t be held to the predictions and pronouncements he makes in the room.

However, Bob did go out on a limb, and what he said was fascinating. First, he explained that a company called Webcom (which happened to be attending the conference) had at one time printed 1 million manuals for RedHat Linux annually. They did this for 4 years, and then in year 5 of the relationship they printed zero. Computer software manuals had completely disappeared.

Moving on to the eBook market, he basically said Kindle is dead and the sales of the iPad to date prove this, although he and Interquest said that only 5% of iPad purchasers last year were planning to use them for eBook reading. He also said that he thinks that Android will be the dominant eBook platform within 12 months. That’s quite a pronouncement, we shall see!

Then he went on to tell us about Lulu’s business, which is evolving in a fascinating way. Bob said they have about $40M revenue, and publish 20,000 new titles per month. But the really interesting thing is that he said that "self-publishing", meaning "personal self-publishing", which Lulu and a couple of others pretty much invented, is tapped out. He said this has come about due to intense competition, notably from large companies like Amazon. This may also explain why he's cheer-leading the demise of Kindle.

Bob explained that Books are “sold”, not “bought”, like vegetables at the supermarket. He said that the publisher's primary role is sales efforts. I think this may have been part of a talk Bob gives regularly, because in the New York market, I am pretty sure everyone in the room found this very obvious.

But a really interesting thing Bob said about printed books is that they are the "same" as eBooks; I.e., the printed book is another type of delivery mechanism, just like the eBook reader. Only it is paper, and presumably disposable.

Explaining further, he pointed out that there is so much free, high quality content on the internet, on virtually any topic you wish to explore, that one can never consume it all. So for books to be relevant, authors need help selling. And that is Lulu’s role, to help an author sell whether e-delivery or physical delivery is most appropriate; not competing with the author. He was very specific about this.

Bob told us that this self-publishing market is a $200 million market with annual growth of 20% in a $10 billion global publishing business. This sounds pretty good on the surface, but he says that kind of growth is too gradual to be exciting to a company like Lulu (or perhaps, their investors). Interestingly, he says young people don't care much about books at all (it’s an “old school” format for content delivery), instead reading blogs and getting free content on the internet. Data backs this up so far, with eBook reader sales much more robust to older people (>35 years of age).

So where are the opportunities? Bob says newer or more precise content, is the growth area. He gave a very good example of a niche book about photography. Man goes into a camera store where they have 50 books about taking pictures. He wants one about taking pictures of the night sky and finds that such a book doesn't exist. Why doesn’t it exist? The reason, Bob explains, is that the author says "I have 300 pages on how to take pictures of the night sky"; the publisher responds by saying, "that sounds like a short chapter in the book we want you to write". So the book the consumer desired never gets published.

In the wrap up, Bob explains this is the problem Lulu wants to solve. And Bob thinks it’s an exciting, large market, growing rapidly. The company is going to help people, with specific content and their own specific audience (that is unattainable to general interest publishers,) use Lulu’s new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to create specific books and then market them. Lulu will be the production and distribution method. More on this as details emerge, great topic for this blog!

HP's Cloud Printing Strategy Nicely Articulated

Check out this super article by Louella Fernandez, principal analyst at QuoCirca, via IT-Director.com.

The venue was HP's recent Analyst Summit in San Francisco. The topics ranged from the ePrint web aware printers, photo products and services like SnapFish, new managed print services (MPS) initiatives and the commercial print arena. Fernandez says HP demonstrated a range of products and services and an integrated go-to-market strategy that will enable it to extend the reach for its vast portfolio.

Really fascinating stuff, according to Fernandez, HP‘s Imaging and Printing Group’s (IPG) revenues grew by 7% in 2010, and overall, IPG accounted for 20% of HP’s revenue. Supplies revenue represents 67% of overall IPG revenue, with commercial printer hardware and consumer printer hardware accounting for 22% and 11% respectively.

Fernandez calls out Ricoh and Xerox as the competitors HP most critically needs to address, but also gives them high marks in terms of "breadth and scale" that sets the company apart from the others.