Web-to-print: The rise of Print 2.0

Source: Exec Digital Canada

Date :08/05/2008 00:44:12

According to the buzz, web-to-print – or Print 2.0 – bridges the gap between digital content online and commercial print production. Exec discovers more about this fast-growing market

Written by Rebecca Waters

It’s always good to start with a question. So, what is web-to-print? Put simply, it is a collective name for a variety of web-based services offered by a printer to his customers, including automated job estimates, print job templates, marketing campaign support and managing document depositaries. This means that businesses can maximize design potential and minimize printing costs without getting bogged down in the day-to-day running of a printing shop.

The ability to control branding and automate marketing processes, whilst streamlining the process of preparing and printing marketing collateral, improving marketing expenditure tracking and reducing management, production, printing and storage costs has been the source of much enthusiasm in the industry.

“Web-to-print has enabled people to print in a much more creative, constructed and controlled fashion,” says Norman Richardson, General Manager of HP’s printing division, a company that has been an early adopter of Print 2.0 boom.

Great expectations?

According to a survey of web to print practices commissioned by Canon late last year, the number of companies using web-to-print solutions will grow up to 68 percent over the next five years.

This study, based on 650 interviews with commercial printers, digital specialists, copy shops and pre-press bureaus in 13 European countries, revealed that almost one-third currently have a web to print solution. This figure is set to grow by more than two-thirds in five years’ time, when around half of all European printers are predicted to be web-to-print capable.

On top of all this, HP estimates that 53 trillion digital pages will be printed in 2010 - an opportunity that they value at more than $296 million. And it seems that the company is all set to capitalise on this burgeoning industry.

Meeting demand

In April, HP announced that it is working with Adobe Systems Inc. to add PDF support to the HP Instant Printing Toolkit, HP’s web to print solution. Designed to simplify the web printing experience for architectural, engineering and construction professionals, the HP Instant Printing toolkit enables users of online plan rooms or collaborative project management sites to print construction documents in-house, saving time and minimizing costly outsourcing.

The web to print solution is designed to meet the ever-growing need for simplified Internet-based printing and follows HP’s acquisition of Tabblo Inc., a privately-held developer of web printing software in March 2007.

“What we want to do is provide the industry with a set of tools - and they’re tools that ship out with every printer that we put in a box,” says Antonio Rodriguez, founder and CEO of Tabblo and director of research and development for HP’s embedded web-to-print team.

“They can also be web services, which is a lot of what we focus on, or they may be end-to-end business models, where you can take your technology and sell photo-customized books or marketing posters on your site with your brand, your content added.”

Adoption

With Canon and HP’s web to print offerings, it’s clear that big players are getting involved in the web-to-print space. But in a market that is still in an early adoption phase, some analysts believe much of what is being offered is under-utilized and lacks sophistication.

Ralf Schlozer, associate director of InfoTrends’ on-demand printing service, puts this down to the lack of integration with internal workflow and administration systems and the high number of internally developed solutions in the market.

“A sign of the lack of sophistication is the low degree of linkage of respondents having implemented a web to print solution with their workflow. Ideally a web to print solution should interface with all [existing] internal management systems to achieve the highest level of automation and interactivity and to avoid errors or manual interventions. There are a lot of potential savings to be made by a higher degree of automation, although web to print systems need to offer the right data interfaces.”

Schlozer also cites the high share of internally developed systems. “While these could be quite sophisticated and targeted towards specific needs of the operation,” he says, “given the small company sizes and general lack of IT skills in the printing industry it is unlikely that many of them are.”

Streamlining

Despite this “low sophistication”, as well as industry giants such as HP and Canon, smaller companies such as UK-based digital marketing specialists Tangent are turning to web to print solutions at an increasing rate to maximize design potential and minimize printing costs.

Tim Green, joint chief executive of Tangent, believes that today’s print installations will become web to print applications in the near future, in both the business-to-business and the business-to-consumer sector.

“In the consumer market, I expect to see web to print follow the trend across general retail with a shift to e-commerce alongside a high street service with new pure e-commerce providers grabbing the dominant share,” he explains.

Meanwhile, in the business-to-business sector, he predicts that print service providers will drive the adoption of web-to-print solutions. “Creating a direct pipe from data, asset base into marketing communications allows companies to promote daily with changeable offerings. This trend towards quick and variable delivery will only accelerate. Web-to-print is the only way to deliver this,” says Green.

Print 2.0

It seems that the main challenge for web-to-print expansion is the affordability of the solution and the software and hardware systems required. Most of the web-to-print services that have been developed by brand name software companies offer mid-to high-range solutions, which remain prohibitively expensive for small- to mid-sized businesses. Additionally, these systems often require the use of digital systems that only a larger print house would maintain.

Having said that, web-to-print demand is expected to increase in the coming years as customers become accustomed to online ordering. So much so that by 2010, InfoTrends estimates that the volume of work submitted via web-to-print will increase by 264 percent and be worth in excess of £7.25 billion.

As with Web 2.0, Print 2.0 has made an auspicious start and the web-to-print industry is gaining pace rapidly. If the figures are to be believed, it looks set to be a boom area for years to come. But can it enter the public consciousness like its predecessor? Only time will tell…

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