Originally appeared in GATF Tech Forecast 2007
By Chuck Gehman
It’s looking very much like 2007 is going to be “The Year of Web-To-Print”. The first ever PIA/GATF Web-To-Print Symposium was a great indication of this trend. Held this past November on a Sunday in Phoenix, Arizona, the symposium hosted a standing-room only audience of more than 100 people, overwhelmingly made up of printers. When asked, the majority indicated that they were planning to acquire W2P technology in the near future.
This has been a long time coming; many vendors and printing companies alike have been working on these applications for several years now. Many business and societal trends have converged to make W2P an important tool for printing companies, and soon it will be a requirement for competitive success.
Web-To-Print is simply e-commerce for printing companies. E-Commerce is becoming, simply put, the same as “commerce”. To understand the pervasiveness of Internet usage today is to understand why Web-To-Print is going to be an increasingly important technology for printing companies. Here are a few statistics (all according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org):
- The size of the internet population continues to increase. The group’s latest survey, conducted February 15 – April 6, 2006 shows that 73% of respondents (about 147 million adults) are internet users, up from 66% (about 133 million adults) in a January 2005 survey.
- Some 38 million full-time workers in the nation have Internet access at their jobs and two-thirds of them (67%) go online at least once per day. Seventy-two percent of full-time workers with Internet access at work say it has improved their ability to do their jobs.
- A May-June 2005 Pew survey found that 67% of all internet users had bought a product online. A full 45% said the internet played a major role as they made major investment or financial decisions. There can be no doubt that these numbers will greatly increase with their next survey on the topic.
Julie Shaffer’s article in this Tech Forecast will provide a good overview of the marketplace, and available solutions (and thanks to Julie and Jim Workman for putting together a terrific program at the W2P Symposium). You can also refer to my article in the October 2006 edition of GATFWorld, entitled Understanding Web-to-Print, for more information about the state of the art.
Because there is already a good body of recent work covering this topic, I wanted to use the opportunity of this year’s Tech Forecast to take a look into the future of W2P applications, and make some predictions about the technology and where it will go in the next few years.
The first premise I’d like to put forth is this: whether you are just starting to examine W2P, or whether you are already working with clients over the Internet, a solution that you are using today, or that you deploy “tomorrow”, will not be the last W2P application you “buy”.
The technology and business models are changing very rapidly, as they have been for the last few years. There are going to be big advances over the next couple of years, so you should expect to “upgrade” your technology. This may mean purchasing an additional (or replacement solution), developing more applications yourself, or buying upgrades to existing software or ASP Internet services you are using to deliver W2P to your clients.
Web 2.0 will bring Web-To-Print 2.0
The Internet world is abuzz with a new concept called Web 2.0. First coined by Internet industry pundits O'Reilly Media in 2004, there are now conferences and blogs about the topic, and many new companies emerging that are developing “Web 2.0 Applications”.
What has happened in the last few years after the “dot com bust,” is that the web has become more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up regularly, some of which have become global phenomena like YouTube and MySpace. Obviously, sites like eBay have become tremendously important in people’s lives, and Google has single-handedly changed the way companies and people find information.
These new applications are generally characterized as a second generation of Internet-based services—and including things like blogs, social networking sites, wikis, and communication tools. They have both online collaboration and sharing among users as hallmarks, but also use new and somewhat radical Web technologies that provide much richer user experiences from within a standard web browser.
Principles behind Web 2.0 (defined by O’Reilly) are:
- That the web is a platform, as opposed to a simple application running on an operating system like Microsoft Windows
- That data is an integral part of the process
- That networks effects are created by an architecture of users participating in defining the applications
- Systems and sites are composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of "open source" development)
- Business models enabled by content and service syndication
- The end of the software adoption cycle (i.e., you are always getting new features and benefits, instead of waiting for long release cycles and product shipments)
- That the software is above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of The Long Tail (see below)
Web 2.0 represents a renewed level of excitement around the use of innovative web applications and services. The transition of web sites from isolated information silos to becoming computing platforms serving web applications to users is a key idea. Earlier web applications or "Web 1.0" often consist of static HTML pages, or even dynamic pages driven by content management system generating pages on the fly out of a database. These systems are primitive compared to the new ideas and rich functionality of Web 2.0 applications.
In contrast, the expectations for what can be done over the Internet when it becomes a real application platform is far beyond what people expected of web sites just a couple of years ago. The evolving technology of Web 2.0 includes server software, content syndication, messaging protocols, and even new web browsers like Firefox, and others.
From a technology standpoint, there are some new web techniques that characterize a Web 2.0 system. Typically, one or more of the following technologies will be employed:
- AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), or similar, rich Internet application development techniques
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- Syndication and aggregation of data in RSS (Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary)/Atom
- Clean and meaningful URLs
- Mashups (a website that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience)
- REST (Representative State Transfer) or XML Web Services
New Business Models For Web-To-Print 2.0
The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired magazine article to describe business and economic models such as Amazon.com. Anderson’s work, which is detailed in his best selling book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006), argues that products that have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the distribution channel is large enough.
The Long Tail is a potential market and the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet can let businesses to tap into that market successfully. Basically, the Long Tail means that individuals are offered greater choice. This has terrific implications for print document owners and users, and tracks with the trends of the print market toward on-demand printing and personalization.
Often discussed in the context of mass market retailers and web-based businesses, The Long Tail has tremendous implications for the producers of content, and since printing customers are clearly content creators and distributors, the business model changes described by the Long Tail are highly applicable to W2P applications.
Where printing used to be produced in very large quantities, by very large manufacturing operations, it is now being produced on-demand (and personalized print) in very small quantities, and in many cases by very small manufacturing operations (although that’s not the key point). The real point is, where in the past, a large company might want to buy millions of impressions of a single job, the new paradigm is that the many customers today (some of whom are entirely new content creators) are filling in the gap left by the disappearance of the million-impression runs. And Web-To-Print 2.0 will be required to help printing companies of today handle the new business models, and access the new distribution channel the Internet represents.
What Will Web-To-Print 2.0 Applications Look Like?
The question of what these applications will look like is hard to answer, but there are many smart business people, entrepreneurs and engineers thinking about it right now. We can certainly expect such applications to be feature rich, and apply intelligence about both how documents creators view their “products”, and how we produce them in the printing company. They will be flexible and configurable by their users, and they will leverage integration with other Web 2.0 applications. They will understand personalization, and they will provide opportunities for cross-media (i.e., Internet and Email) applications, in addition to and complementing, print products.
In terms of print manufacturing, they will be JDF-rich (not just JDF-compatible, or JDF-compliant), and they will integrate with workflow and production systems within the printing company, to address the increasingly short turns and shorter runs inherent in the business today.
When Can We Expect Web-To-Print 2.0 Applications?
I will forecast this is something that will come to the print market within the next two years. After reading this, the reader might assume that I am suggesting you wait until these new applications I am describing arrive before doing anything. But not so: there are lots of examples of companies in the industry doing real volumes of business over the web today. The attendees of the GATF W2P Symposium certainly are believers.
As I said at the top of this article, whether you are just starting to examine W2P, or whether you are already working with clients over the Internet, a solution that you are using today, or that you deploy “tomorrow”, will not be the last W2P application you “buy”, and the technology and business models are evolving very rapidly.
But if you aren’t in the game today, your company will not have the learning experience, and the customer engagements, to be positioned to take full advantage when these new paradigms come to fruition. And frankly, there’s plenty of money to be made by offering these services today.
