ThinkMSP Summit 2014

I accepted an invitation from Mark Potter, the publisher of Canvas magazine, to attend the first instance of a new conference, called ThinkMSP Summit 2014.  Mark is a really exceptional guy who serves with me on the board of the Electronic Document Scholarship Foundation.  I've known him for a few years now, and he always has great ideas.  This conference is definitely one of them.  It was an invitation only, very intimate event. I met a lot of new, interesting people, which for me is a rarity at printing industry related events (other than Dscoop, that is.)  There was a tremendous amount of interaction at the event. It was held at the Marriott Evergreen Conference Resort in Stone Mountain, Ga, which is a very nice property in a beautiful setting.

Gene Farrell
In a talk entitled, "The Art of Business Development", Gene Farrell, GM of Amazon Web Services, talked about all the ups and downs of launching the awesome FreeStyle soda machine at CocaCola, then moving over to launch a major new cloud-based software initiative, called Amazon Workspaces, which went from zero to 5000 customers in 40 days after launch. Even more interesting is that Workspaces is a product delivered with Microsoft Operating Systems running on AWS.

Kmberly Lyles Folkman
“There is a new paradigm shift in education and in business. Visual thinking and learning is at the forefront. It has brand impact for businesses, social and global impact for individuals and consumers. As a digital visual culture, we have to know how to think visually to communicate. We now have to fuse images and text to communicate ideas.” – Kimberley Lyles-Folkman, Ph.D., The Art Institute (Atlanta)

Kimberly's talk, "Visual Thinking and Learning in the 21st Century" was fascinating. But her student Dustin Kemptner, was even more interesting. It is just so thrilling to hear a student talk about graphic design work, and new ideas. He's won a few Addy awards.

Dustin talked about a rebranding experiment he did for a German restaurant in nearby Cumming, Ga. His idea was to make the restaurant an exciting and fun destination, pointing out in a tongue and cheek way that that no one ever says, "Let's go get German", like they do about Italian, or Mexican food, for example.  His campaign would definitely sell this idea.  A new logo, menus, a website and mobile app all tied in the new branding effort. Print and digital media. He also created a "Boot" for beer, which employed temperature sensitive ink on the glass, and as the patron consumed more beer, it revealed new messages egging the drinker on, such as "You're really going to drink the whole thing, aren't you?"  The final message on the boot revealed a QR code that provided a free ride home via Uber.  

Greg Cottichia
Greg is a serial entrepreneur and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz School of Business. He spoke about B2B marketing, and how much it has changed in the last couple of years, and used his own experience launching his latest company, Malcovery Security, as the example.

The conventional wisdom about marketing, including or perhaps especially, on the web, has changed. Salespeople knocking on doors and developing the relationships is only a small part of the equation now. Instead, according to the Corporate Executive Board, at the point of the customer's first contact with a vendor today, 57% of the process to arrive at a purchasing decision has already been completed. Customers no longer need a salesperson to enlighten them to their needs.  When they finally contact your company, they expect you to take the order and actually can be very annoyed by old school sales tactics at this point in the cycle. 

So the bottom line point Greg made is, your entire organization is in sales and marketing today.  The business is no longer dependent on one individual any longer.  It is marketing’s task to influence the 57 percent of the sale that occurs before the sales contact.  Then, sales must do their job efficiently and align their efforts (and offers) with that marketing. In Greg's case, he worked with  a technology savvy student, Megan Skiff, to implement a new set of marketing strategies for Malcovery, notably Inbound, that paid off. Malcovery was one of the first customers of her new agency, MixyMarketing.

Improv
To keep things from getting too stuffy and serious, Mark brought in an Atlanta Improv troop to encourage even more interaction, and get people thinking creatively. The session, called "Improvising to Success", conducted by Atlanta's Village Comedy was incredibly fun.  Imagine a roomful of business people pretending to throw medieval axes at one another.

Don't Miss
Mark has written a book that is available now, called Egrets, Hockey Sticks & Roller Skates. I haven't had time to read it yet, but picked up my copy at the event and am looking forward to it.

"Egrets, Hockey Sticks & Roller Skates is a creative example of why stories work.  Mark Potter has shared some of his experiences and a bit of himself to help move a group of people.  We all can benefit from the moral to his stories."

- Daniel Pink, author of "To Sell Is Human"

Following in a traditional started by Jennifer Matt, President of Web-To-Print Experts, Inc., all proceeds from the book go directly to the Electronic Document Scholarship Foundation. Click here for more information on the book, and to obtain a copy.

Seeing the Azure Cloud from the Inside

I had the wonderful opportunity last week to visit one of Microsoft's data centers. Since I am bound by NDA, I won't say where it was, and I won't talk about anything that I can't find discussed in a press release or an article on the web about Microsoft Azure and MSFT's data center footprint.  That still leaves a tremendous amount to talk about, though. And frankly, reading about a place like this is one thing, but actually going and touring it is quite another.  I'll try to give you a feeling for that here.

The company describes the number of global facilities they maintain as "more than 10 and less than 100". You can get a feeling for the global footprint by looking at this Azure Regions site, and also by reading the Azure Wikipedia entry.  Keep in mind that Microsoft hosts over 200 of their own services in their data centers, including Bing, Outlook (formerly Hotmail), the new Office365, Skydrive, Xbox, their robust advertising network, and much more. Matthew Sorvaag's website has some info on where the DCs are, although I think this is a bit out of date.

If you are like one of my many elitist techie Microsoft bashing friends, you'll be sad to know that Apple's iCloud runs on Microsoft Azure, and has since 2011.  Recall that earlier that year, AAPL had a very embarassing outage, and other issues.  Less than a year later, reports from insiders confirmed the service was running at both AMZN and MSFT. Most know that AAPL has their own data centers, too, so what parts of these services are operating on any of these facilities is a bit hard to determine, what with Apple's great penchant for secrecy and the imprudence (and likely contractually limited) of talking about the relationship for either of the Cloud vendors.

Microsoft has produced a terrific video, Windows Azure Data Centers: the 'Long Tour', describing several of their data centers extremely well. The video is a couple of years old, but does justice to the scale and approach. In fact, at least one of the facilities in the video has been substantially upgraded since the video was shot (and the description in the movie is already impressive!)

The Microsoft Quincy, WA DC, is today even bigger than this photo and as described in the movie: it has three big buildings now (new one is in the lower left, where it looks like an open field in this foto. Foto from NYT Kyle Bair/Bair Aerial)

The company is employing state of the art technologies and processes in all areas.  The locations, construction, staffing, networking, server deployment and maintenance, as well as operations are all advanced and world class.  It's worth noting that the DCs described in the video are generation 3 and generation 4.  MSFT now has gen 5 centers, and is looking forward to a day when they occupy generation 6 facilities.  If you aren't familiar with all the lingo around data centers, don't confuse these generations with data center "tiers", which generally describe "redundancy".

• Tier 1 = Non-redundant capacity components (single uplink and servers).
• Tier 2 = Tier 1 + Redundant capacity components.
• Tier 3 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Dual-powered equipments and multiple uplinks.
• Tier 4 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Tier 3 + all components are fully fault-tolerant including uplinks, storage, chillers, HVAC systems, servers etc. Everything is dual-powered.

These MSFT facilities are all N+2, or in other words: whatever components in place are deemed to be mission critical, there are 2 backups in place.

Generation 4 in full operation now

ITPACs, which are being deployed in the newer MSFT data centers are purpose built, modular containers that resemble shipping containers, they are are power efficient and operationally better. Watch this great ITPAC video, which describes how they efficiently combine compute, power, cooling, and networking in self-contained modules. From an environmental perspective, the ITPACs are a great innovation. On cold days, a portion of the hot exhaust air from the servers is redirected internally through a mixing unit on top of the ITPAC where it mixes and warms the air to a temperature suitable for the servers.  I saw units with HP or Dell equipment installed, as well as storage and networking.  

One interesting statistic to note is that the many tens of thousands of servers in the facility together lose about 300 hard drives a week. In fact, this is one of the very limited number of tasks the operations personnel at the facility do-- replace hard drives.  There are several amazing magical elements to this:  first, no customer or service is impacted by the hard drive failures. Second, the techs perform the drive replacements without any knowledge of what data is stored on the servers. Finally, the hard drives are erased, and then crushed into teeny tiny little pieces.

Everyone who is anyone in the Internet has used F5 boxes at one point or another. These boxes are highly regarded. And those of you who know this, also know these devices are very expensive. I was only in one hall in this facility, and, along with many, many other of the usual suspects in Internetworking gear, I saw tens of millions of dollars in F5 gear ALONE.  Pretty impressive.

Another example is the number of generators in place at this facility, just astonishing.  I got to step inside one of the generator housings, and they aren't the cute little CATs shown in the movie above... instead they are monstrous 20 cylinder engines painted gray with fuel feed pipes as big as wide as a manhole cover.  While inside, I was praying to God that the generator didn't start because it would have been very, very scary and loud.

I was also in an electrical room with a similarly scary amount of electricity being fed through it.  This room was one of 6... remember that the facility is "larger than 10 football fields" in size. Let's face, when you've seen row after row of the same server and storage boxes, it sort of becomes mind numbing. So when you go visit the power distribution, it's a little exciting.  For example, the circuit breakers in the Siemens distribution equipment have their own cranes on the top of the rack, because they are so heavy, it takes more than one very strong person to pick them up.

Crazy giant Siemens Circuit Breaker that comes with its own little crane.

One debate I've had with many colleagues in both IT and in Printing over the years regards whether it is prudent to operate your own data center, or to outsource.  Cloud aside, when you visit a facility like this, you understand that an operation like this, with billions of dollars of investment, and run like a top secret military facility, you realize this is something that most companies cannot do.

When you then add in the economics of the Cloud, assuming you can determine that it makes sense for your business, it is hard not to come to the stark realization that you are getting capabilities that truly will provide an enormous competitive advantage for your company. There are numerous choices, and they need to be examined very thoroughly but it is pretty clear that these services are game changers. We must embrace them for as much of our IT infrastructure as we possibly can.

Workflow Renaissance

Workflow has been an important topic in the Graphic Communications business since there has been "technology" involved. The modern definition of workflow kicked into high gear as desktop publishing came into commercial use.  Then it really became essential when Print Service Providers (PSPs) adopted Computer to Plate (CTP) in the late 1990s. 

So it's kind of fascinating that today, there is a workflow renaissance going on.  It's really interesting because it's primarily driven by print service provider needs that focus on making vendor equipment more efficient.  These demands have always been present, but because they didn't gate the hardware sale for the press maker, nor did satisfying them differentiate a particular vendor company from its competition, they were not top of mind for anyone. 

That has changed, for a number of reasons.  

First, Web-To-Print is maturing, and many more PSPs need super efficient workflows to handle the high volume of extremely short run work. Second, presses are bigger and faster, as well as more expensive.  So PSPs ramp up sales efforts to increase equipment utilization, to pay the press bills.  To make money, labor expenses (and as a result, craft), must be kept at a minimum and workflow software is the only answer.

The demands from PSPs are frankly greater than what most vendors are delivering. With some great exceptions, many of the workflow solutions in the market today can be considered "legacy software".
Two of the brightest exceptions today are HP SmartStream Production Center, and Enfocus' Switch line of products, which we aren't going to go into in detail here, but may in a future post.

Instead, for the moment, let's think about some of the things vendors need to address to take workflow to the next level, and satisfy the emerging requirements of PSPs for the next few years. I'm probably going to write some discrete posts on some of these topics in the future, too.

- Sell software standalone vs. bundling with hardware. 

- Make workflow software work well with other people's equipment, including competitor equipment.

- Package and describe workflow software in bite size pieces that directly address the MOST IMPORTANT customer/users needs directly. 

- Make the existing software modern with user interface enhancements.  Software that runs on Windows will soon benefit from the "Metro" interface.  Some of the interfaces of industry software just look horrible, and users have become accustomed to new, beautiful web interfaces they use in their life outside of work.

- Make workflow a sexy part of the print production story, with giant screens, visualization and data elements, ala Landa and HP Production Center.  

- One of the coolest things about the Landa launch was the Tablet device from which the operator could control 3 presses

- Appropriate parts of Workflow software should run in browsers, and even smartphones. Handheld devices are incredibly valuable for managing a large and busy production floor.  They are good for a small and busy production floor, too.

- Touchscreens everywhere appropriate. Command line interfaces are still important for the tech nerds, though. 

- Rule based automation should be defined either graphically, or by writing code, depending on how complex the rules, and how sophisticated the user.

- Run the workflow software in the Cloud, delivering it as a set of services at tiered monthly subscription fees. If Adobe can do it with Creative Suite, it can be done with workflow software, too.

- Larger customers today are far less concerned about whether something runs on a particular piece of hardware.  Smaller customers would also likely gravitate toward the subscription model. 

- Create better and more integration with MIS and Web-To-Print systems.

- Create better ways for customers to solve each other's problems and let customers enhance the software, ala Enfocus Crossroads-World community website. 

- Add "cross-media" or marketing services stuff, where it directly benefits the PSP strategy to drive pages and profits.

- Help PSPs show how print complements email--  which for a younger audience with money to spend today is important (i.e., not how email or "cross media" complements print-- that's a message from yesterday.)

- Increasingly, the assets customers use to create printed materials are stored in the cloud.  Workflow systems need to be able to reach into those systems (via APIs), and consume the assets to make print jobs.

In summary, we're talking about a whole new generation of print production workflow.  It takes into account the new environment PSPs are operating in. It makes it so employees (especially those new to the industry) will want to become or stay involved in print production.  It makes the company profitable, efficient and competitive. It remains to be seen whether this will be delivered by the existing vendors, or by the new vendors... but one thing is certain, it will happen!

The Era of the Hard Drive in the Sky has Begun!

Yesterday, Google announced Google Drive, a cloud storage system that is among the most anticipated features of any software system, ever. Industry analysts, pundits and gadflies have been predicting the eventuality of this capability for years. In it's initial launch incarnation, Google drive is simple to install and easy to use, and as far as I'm concerned, totally lives up to the expectations built-up around it! Out of the gate, anyone who signs up gets 5GB of online storage for free. Upgrade to 20gb, 100gb or even a terabyte for very affordable incremental fees. It makes storing files to the cloud and syncing them among multiple devices seamless (PCs, Macintosh and Android Smartphones today, Apple iOS and other OS/devices later). Google Drive acts just like another drive on Windows or the Mac. You can copy or move files to it, and even create new files and folders in it. I installed it on my Macintosh first, and when I logged in, I just saw all my Google Docs files in a native OS window on my MacBook Air. It could not have been simpler.

The timing of the Google announcement may have been planned to steal the thunder of a Microsoft announcement only two days earlier-- of a similar solution, the new version of SkyDrive, which gives MSFT a competitive offering in the cloud storage arena. Notable in the announcement are new storage applications, new support for devices running Mac OS X Lion and iOS, as well as support for Windows phones. SkyDrive automatically synchronizes the devices to which it is connected. Files and folders are organized in SkyDrive in the same manner to which we've all become accustomed on our local devices.

While Google and Microsoft are well-known as rivals to one another, they are both equally wary of startups who might come along and eat their lunch. In this case, those companies are Dropbox and to a lesser extent Box (formerly box.net). Dropbox was founded in 2007, and has a good head start on both of the (in the case of MSFT relatively) new competitors. Dropbox has more than 25 million people using the service, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, as well as with mobile apps on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Drew Houston, Dropbox's Co-Founder and CEO, upon hearing the announcement of Google Drive, tweeted, "In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine." I'm not sure if this response is hubris or real fear. Prior to the announcement, Dropbox's private company valuation was speculated to be about $4 Billion. It remains to be seen if it can maintain that sky high valuation in light of the fact that two of the biggest tech companies in the world just came out with respective "features" that come close to duplicating Dropbox's entire business. That is sort of the key: for MSFT and Google, this is a feature among many thousands of other features, not the whole company or even the most important part. On the flip side, though, Dropbox has been expecting this kind of competition for a long, long time. Now its here and it is formidable. For example, Google Drive's pricing is roughly 1/4 of Dropbox's pricing today. That could dramatically change the game, in terms of acquisition of customers for Google, and loss of revenue for Dropbox. Furthermore, the integration between Google Drive and Google Apps, though a bit minimalistic today, is already very useful for companies like my own who have been using Google Apps almost exclusively for the last couple of years.

For consumers of this technology, it's going to be exciting to watch this competition between industry giants. In addition to simple storage and backup in the cloud, these services offer great collaboration and sharing possibilities-- both intracompany and between companies. It's hard to believe that in this day and age high-tech companies would still be using technologies like FTP to share files, but they are. Replacing such primitive services with these new technologies is good for everyone-- the creator, the user, the printer, the IT guys, everyone. With the large files we consume daily in the graphic arts industry, these services offer a really affordable and easy to use alternative to old fashioned, error-prone methods that our customers don't want to understand and shouldn't have to!

HP Graphic Arts Users Group, Dscoop

I just returned from Dscoop7 in Washington, DC. This was the 7th annual face-to-face meeting of the Digital Solutions Cooperative, founded in 2005. Dscoop is the independent global community of graphic arts business owners and technical professionals who use HP Indigo and Scitex equipment and related solutions. Dscoop7 had over 2,000 attendees and more than 150 sessions. More than 90 vendors showcased their solutions in addition to HP, and we also had a pre-conference program for graphic designers this year called DSee, which was wildly successful.

I'm proud to say that the Operations Committee (of which I am the incoming chairman) was responsible for a track of 10 sessions over 2 days, all of which were delivered to full house crowds! Kudos to Mike Blanco (with GPA), our outgoing chairman who led our group into the conference and Amy Biedenharn at Dscoop HQ, who facilities our every move.

I put together two sessions for this year's event. My first session was a "201-level" panel discussion called Fine Tuning Web-To-Print: Implementation and Operation. We realized going into the conference that a lot of technical and operations folks already know the basics of W2P, because these things are becoming part of how we all do business. A lot of companies now run more than one system or are in their second or third implementation.

So we put together a panel of experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities and talk about the nuts and bolts of such topics as storefronts, cross-media capabilities, e-commerce, workflow and business system integration, variable data printing and customization online, hosting decisions and more.

I wanted to have representatives of all the great Web-To-Print solutions present at the event. Logistically-speaking, it's awfully hard these days to get technical people from printing companies to commit to speaking at events. Thanks to Leslie Wengenroth at PageFlex, the well known VDP and storefront vendor, we got Paul O'Brien, CTO of Acculink, a leading-edge printer in Greenville, NC to join us. I managed to round up a nice cadre of technical people from most of the solutions present at Dscoop7: Alex Boissezon from Pixfizz; Chris Young from XMPie, a Xerox company; Greg Salzman- CEO of Aleyant Systems; Steven Enstad- one of the founders of PageDNA; and Becky Schick from HiFlex, now an HP company as a result of their recent acquisition.

There was a time in the not too distant past when a panel like this would have seen the vendors bickering over small points and vying for the microphone to get the last word in. This panel was nothing like that, in fact there was much agreement on many points, little contention. These companies all have powerful solutions: Paul and I as the users on the panel could easily see the value in each of their products and technologies. In the recent past, software vendors had more of the approach that the marketplace was a zero sum game, and to win you had to squash the competition. This isn't the case any longer. Today, you must pick and choose among solutions that fit your target customer and market, and they must work together. That was the overriding message of the session. I had 3 pages of "seed" questions I put together in advance with the help of the panel. I only made it through a handful. We had fantastic audience interaction, many great topics arose. The session could have continued for the entire afternoon if the time had been available!

The second session I presented was called Printing is Easy, Everything Else is Hard (Workflow Automation), and was somewhere in between introductory and 201 level. I partnered with Bill Weiners from Digital Lizard, who is a kindred spirit and well known in the group. Digital Lizard is owned by venerable Las Vegas offset printer Creel, and while smaller than Mimeo, Digital Lizard is very advanced from a technology standpoint-- and they own almost as many Indigo presses as we do! Like Mimeo, they produce both documents on demand as well as photo products.

The premise behind the session was that when you have powerful equipment on your floor, printing is the easy part. The hard part is getting the work from the customer onto the press, tracking it throughout the steps in your operation, getting it finished and out the door, finally delivered and billed. The solution for many of these challenges lies with advanced workflow automation.

Bill and I presented case studies of the way we do things at our respective companies. We talked about key building blocks for implementing solutions to help our attendees streamline their operation, while improving efficiency, quality and profitability. This session was in the last time slot of the event on a Saturday afternoon, and I am happy to report that the room was completely full. Bill and I can't take full credit for the topic or the speakers being such an exciting draw-- it's just as much a product of the fact that the Dscoop audience is definitely the best and brightest, and most dedicated, group of printers in the industry!

There were many, many other highlights at the the event. Notable among these, the introduction of new HP Indigo Presses, the Indigo 10000, Indigo 20000 and Indigo 30000 the "biggest" among them, in more ways than one-- these new machines can print in the popular 29" or B2 sizes, and applications include commercial printing, labeling and packaging. There were many other announcements, including software upgrades and new workflow solutions. HiFlex was highlighted in a couple of sessions, and in the solutions showcase. I will talk more about the software aspects in an upcoming post.

Keynote marketer Sally Hogshead provided an exciting and fun kickstart to the event. It's the first time I've seen a Keynote presenter at an industry conference do a shot on stage! HP Indigo GM Alon Bar-Shany, presented a fantastic "state of the industry" report, with terrific insight. Bar-Shany paints a very good picture for adopters of the technology, and HP Indigo as an organization is well positioned to help printers capitalize on the opportunities ahead. Along with all the data, Alon pointed out that Dscoop7 began on March 22nd, which was the 10th anniversary of HP's acquisition of Indigo. Resting on the laurels of the past 10 years is not in the cards, though, as the company charges forward!

Even though Dscoop7 has just ended, I'm already looking forward to Dscoop8 next February in Dallas, Texas!

(photo credit Bryan Yeager, Associate Director, Infotrends, from pre-Drupa festivities at HP in Israel the week prior to Dscoop7.)

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.

iPad is... Printing (via AirPrint)

I must say I was pretty blown away when I first saw the Apple "iPad is Amazing" commercial, although since I've seen it about 1,000 times now, I find the music a little annoying. What impressed me about it initially is the fact that it starts out with an "iPad is..." premise, and the first thing it proclaims the iPad to be is, printing! I never doubted that Apple knew the lack of printing was a big gap at launch, but it's still nice to see them promoting it in a big way in a major TV commercial that has now been seen by millions and millions of people. And putting it before the other "amazing" things about the iPad, in fact, is kind of amazing. If you haven't seen the commercial, check it out on YouTube, here.

So let's talk for a moment about what makes this possible on the iPad, which is the technology called AirPrint, requiring Apple IOS 4.2 or later, and an HP ePrint-compatible printer. Today, AirPrint itself only works with HP printers that support ePrint (more on this later.)

According to HP, ePrint evolved from CloudPrint, an innovative technology created by HP Labs, the company's central research and development group. Apple AirPrint on an IOS 4.2 and later device (like an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad) finds printers on WiFi networks and then allows printing text, photos and graphics to them without the need to install drivers or special software.

iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users running IOS 4.2 and later will find a new print function within apps on their device. They can simply tap the "action" icon, then tap the "Print" button, configure printing options, then tap "Print".

A printer must be specifically ePrint enabled. Printing to a device attached to another computer is not possible with AirPrint. There are now several HP printers that support ePrint, and HP maintains a growing list of such devices. The latest one to catch my eye at this writing is the Laserjet Pro CM1415FNW, which is an amazing color laser desktop MFP, at a very attractive price, with an incredible feature set. I believe this is the first Laserjet to support ePrint, the other printers being inkjets. Get the datasheet here.

Cloud Printing Service Provider. Is it a term we should embrace?

I think the Cloud is here to stay, and I think Cloud is a term that has been embraced far and wide, but it must be used correctly.

The test I would put forth for whether your service or platform is truly "Cloud" is if I can contract for the services you offer without speaking to a human being, and activate/deactivate them when I want to stand them up or tear them down.

There is no "overhead" or startup costs for me to become engaged with you-- I literally can take advantage of the services when I need them, and only pay for them as I am using them.

That's what differentiates Cloud from "ASP" or "SaaS" or just the "plain old Internet". This is a nuance that I think a lot of non-technical people miss and it's driven by a combination of technology and business model.

Companies that use the term Cloud without fulfilling this promise could easily be seen as jumping on the hype bandwagon, and further confuse the market. Mimeo has been called a Cloud Printing Service Provider by Gartner, and we do fit the definition I've provided here. However, we are still very careful to only use this term with audiences we are sure will "get it."

Mimeo and SlideRocket: Printing In The Cloud

A great example of Rich Internet Printing is the collaboration between my company, Mimeo.com, and SlideRocket. In this case, our two companies had to work together to invent a way that Sliderocket presentations could be professionally printed by Mimeo. SlideRocket is part of this new generation of RIAs. It is a Web 2.0 online presentation application that allows users to produce slideshows that have some advantages over creating presentations in desktop applications like Microsoft PowerPoint. SlideRocket runs in a web browser, instead of requiring the installation of software on your computer. It features collaboration tools that let users share slides and other assets (like graphics and movies) between presentations. Because the application is Internet-based, these users can be geographically dispersed and still share nicely. This collaboration, and user-generated content sharing, is what makes SlideRocket a unique and powerful Web 2.0 application. The company recently announced that Chuck Dietrich, former VP GM at Salesforce.com, joined the company as CEO, see the TechCrunch article here.

The SlideRocket relationship with Mimeo involved the use of the MimeoConnect SOAP API technology. This is a set of Web Services that let partners submit files, define product intent, get quotes and proofs, and submit orders, recipient addresses, shipping methods and payments. This technology solves the problem of delivering content files and placing orders; primarily the communication between our two applications in the cloud (i.e., cloud to cloud).

With that connectivity in hand, we then needed to solve how SlideRocket would take their rich content (screen-based Flash presentations) and turn it into PDF files to send to Mimeo (this was a Mimeo requirement, due to our automated PDF-based production workflow). Finally, we needed to create a way to let the non-technical SlideRocket user to specify the product intent to communicate to Mimeo for manufacturing.

To solve the former problem, SlideRocket created a server-based application that “printed” the “slide deck” to a PDF file. To solve the latter problem, Mimeo created a special interface designed to reside within the SlideRocket Flash application. When the user chooses “Print” from the SlideRocket menu, they can either choose to print on their local printer, or print “high quality with finishing options” via Mimeo.

The interface we built incorporates a subset of Mimeo’s new photo-realistic document viewer. We call it MimeoProof, because it is about as close as one can get to holding a print product in their hands by viewing it as an image on the screen. The Sliderocket version lets the user see their presentation, visually depicting paper stocks, covers and binding choices. This is an important part of helping the non-technical user specify product intent, it gives them the confidence they need to proceed with the order.

Once the user places their order on the SlideRocket site, e-commerce and print-specific transactions flow: we are sent a PDF file containing the slides, and an XML transaction containing the order information (desired quantity of books, destination, shipping method, etc.) The next day, or at some point in the near future depending on the user’s choice, a beautiful bound version of the Sliderocket slides shows up on the user’s doorstep in whatever quantity they specified.

A Visit to Google Makes Us Think...

David and I recently went to a breakfast at Google’s cool offices in NYC, at Chelsea Market. Here is some good info on the Google presence in NYC.

The event focused on Google Enterprise Apps, co-sponsored by venerable NYC IT consultants BlueWolf. Kristin Shevis, Google’s Director Northeast Google Enterprise presented, along with several other Google and BlueWolf staffers. Really good turnout, looked to me like about 100 companies present. Obviously a hot topic. A couple of excellent case studies were presented, with a focus primarily on cost savings. In addition to the formal case studies, during Q and A, several members of the audience actually answered questions from other attendees, primarily about enterprise Google mail services. It didn’t appear that anyone in the room had actually deployed non-email apps on an enterprise basis (i.e., instead of Microsoft Office)… but there was great interest. The applications are still pretty basic, but for a lot of uses, they are quite adequate.

Google documents are about collaboration. As an outside observer, beyond the cost savings, this is the primary advantage in using Google Apps. Google documents can be edited by more than one person simultaneously (actually, up to 10 people, according to Google); Spreadsheets can be edited by up to 50 people simultaneously; they can also be shared with up to 200 collaborators and viewers. Presentations can be edited by 10 people simultaneously, out of a total of 200 who can be either collaborators or viewers.

Which led David and I, during our fifteen-block power walk back to Mimeo’s NYC headquarters, to discuss some of the challenges that might be faced in professionally printing Google documents, which are “dynamic” for lack of a better word. How do you print a dynamic, collaborative document? It is clear that while the Google apps are not particularly competitive with “desktop” applications right now, someday they will be, and in the foreseeable future. Formatting is pretty weak in Google Apps right now. Control of printing is even weaker, which is somewhat surprising because it does appear in other areas that Google has some sophisticated technology for handling PDF files. I hope someone is thinking about this at Google, because there clearly will be a need for professional printing in years to come, it isn’t going to be eliminated by these collaboration tools— demand will increase for many document types coming out of these apps.

Furthermore, what does the new document model look like? I ask this because Google is not the only company working hard to put document creation, collaboration and management “in the Cloud.” There is, of course, the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010, which recently got some splash in the media and apparently, according to hype, will be a focus at WPC09, Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which begins on Monday July 13th, in New Orleans; click here for the details.

Online office suite developer Zoho announced a couple of weeks ago that they have created a seamless API integration with Microsoft SharePoint, which I haven’t had a chance to look at in depth yet.

We will be looking at all of this very closely here, and would love to hear your thoughts on these new developments.