Prepress production in the cloud
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Prepress Production in the cloud Tony Nouwen
description
Tony Nouwen, Expert in production, workflow and print process, Concentra, Belgium and Walter Maldeghem, Agfa Graphics
Transcript of Prepress production in the cloud
Prepress Production in the cloud
Tony Nouwen
• Who am i• What is Concentra• Our Partnership in print• The Virtual Printcenter
• Challenges• Configuration• What changed• Customer usability
• Why Agfa• Performance
Agenda
Intro – who am ITony Nouwen• I live in Hasselt, Belgium.• 8 years in small printhouses• 21 years experience within Concentra. Print, workflow
and IT-systems related projects
What is Concentra• Privately owned by family Baert (130y)• Regional Media Company• Turnover: 250m€• Employees: 1000• 8 locations, including NL (weekly free newspapers)
Our partnership in print
Concentra & Corelio
Coldset Printing Partners [CPP]
• CPP is join-venture of coldset printing activities of 2 major Belgian media groups • CPP prints own in-house publications as well as external international products
like The Wallstreet Journal Europe, Daily Express, Daily Star, Zaman,...
• 15 mio copies/week• 10 CTP units - 450k sqm/year - 1.8 mio plates/year• 11 presses
Coldset Printing Partners & Agfa Graphics
Virtual Print CenterPrivate cloud hosting & managed services
for prepress production
A New Approach
Agfa Graphics moves prepress workflow from the print site into the Cloud
The Challenges
A number of key requirements1. Optimize, automate and improve efficiency
2. Reduce cost, driven by economies of scale
3. Uniformity & standardization
4. Print quality improvement
5. Operational excellence and latitude
6. Single Central control center
7. Best service towards customers
8. Cost of ownership >>> cost of operation
What was Agfa Graphics able to offer?
proposed a solution:
– Hosting Agfa IT infrastructure / datacenters secure & managed services provided by Agfa ICS
– Running :Arkitex software & services by Agfa Graphics– Offered as a webservice
In fact, a new term “Prepress as a Service” (PaaS)
The Cloud Configuration
The Cloud Configuration
What changed with the cloud?
• One central control center
• Better control and overview for operators
• Faster, less errors and more reliable
• Improved flexibitlity
• Better customer communication
• Cost are reduced and efficiency is improved
Case: Anonymous customer about Portal Usability
User statement about uploading pages “Uploading a page in portal is as easy as posting something to
Facebook. I can do that, it’s build for me!”
Why partner with Agfa?
• Internal IT services can be expensive & usually lack “application” knowledge
• General cloud services providers only offers infrastructure and lacks “prepress” services and knowledge
• Only Agfa could provide a PaaS solution
• Agfa has been a reliable Newspaper solution partner to both Corelio and Concentra for many years
Cloud performance• A couple of figures
– We print circa 15 mio copies per week
Upload / Peak[PDF’s]
Download / peak[Tiff’s]
Number of files 2.000/day500/hour
7.500/day2000/hour
Datavolumes 9 GB/day1,5 GB/hour
24 GB/day6 GB/hour
Telco 10-60 MbpsPublic internet [secured]
100 MbpsMPLS fibre optic
