E-commerce: positive change for the printing industry? Part 2: Supply chain benefits or loss of control?

Originally appeared in High Volume Printing magazine
By Chuck Gehman

In our first installment (High Volume Printing, June 2000, page 74), we identified the types of companies that are promoting “dotcom” services to the graphic communications industry. We also highlighted some of the more prominent companies addressing this marketplace.

The one type of e-commerce company that is creating the most controversy and that is the loudest (in terms of marketing and advertising spending) is the category we described as “the Intermediaries”. These are the archetypal “business to business e-commerce” companies who want to become part of the transaction between print buyer and seller. For this article, we felt it was important to take a step back and really examine what is important to a printing company when it comes to these companies and their services.

It is interesting to note that in the time between the first installment in this series and this article, market forces have caused a number of these companies to postpone IPO plans, layoff employees and re-evaluate their business models. Keeping that in mind, it is truly amazing that still more companies have emerged since the first article who are also targeting the graphic communications industry.

Will we be able to just let this trend go by and continue doing business with the status quo, or do we need to be active participants and make decisions that will change the face of our business? It’s tempting (especially in light of recent events) to just wait and see what happens, but there may be significant benefits in making a proactive decision to work with these e-commerce companies.

Supply Chain

To understand the benefits that e-commerce can offer to printers, we have to take a closer look at the supply chain in the printing industry. I’m sure we’ve all heard the analogy of a printing company and a car company… we build the car, but use fenders and doors supplied by the customer. I think we can all see some validity in that analogy, but the supply chain really addresses broader issues than the customer bringing their own parts.

The fact is, the customer (and various vendors the customer works with, like designers and photographers) is actually a key part of the manufacturing process in our industry. The supply chain in the printing industry goes as far “upstream” as the designer working in their home studio, and as far “downstream” as the bindery, where the end product is finished for delivery to the “end user”.

Even the most efficient operation spends time on what could be considered unnecessary interaction with customers and suppliers: fixing problems, correcting misunderstandings, attempting to agree on color issues, “signing off” on approvals and making last minute changes. Talking to customers is a good thing, however I don’t think anyone disagree that time spent solving problems would be better spent avoiding them altogether.

This is where e-commerce (or really, the new buzzword “e-production”) holds the promise of bringing real benefits to printers. By integrating and automating both the workflow and the transactions that add unnecessary iterations to an already labor intensive process, printing company personnel are free to focus on the real manufacturing process of getting ink on paper.

If you look closely at your operation today, you may well discover that your company is already participating in e-commerce. The fact is that many companies have been using EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) for years to exchange purchase orders. The GCA (Graphic Communication Association) has actively promoted the use of EDI for things like paper purchasing for many years now. Using EDI, printers and their suppliers have cut back on the amount of paper work changing hands, simplified ordering and billing, and reduced errors and miscommunication. In many ways, today’s Business to Business (B2B) e-commerce is really a sophisticated “next generation” of the EDI concept.

E-commerce may not benefit every print-buyer-printer relationship. If you are a printer whose customers print one magazine with you, month in and month out for many years (interrupted by a contract negotiation, perhaps every 5 years, that takes place on a golf course), you are probably not going to execute that transaction in an e-commerce system. If this type of contract is your standard relationship, at the current state of the art, you may not see benefits from going “e”, other than perhaps electronically exchanging POs for paper purchases or other transactions between both companies.

But it is likely that “e-production” can help just about every enterprise in the graphic communications industry, by streamlining the supply chain. If you can more easily provide status information, exchange previously paper documents and even content files, obtain approvals electronically, and generally improve interaction with your customers, everyone wins.

Some of these new services are providing useful production tools like job ticketing, job status (both for internal and for customer communications), and even automated preflighting. Not to mention the fact that these systems can provide extremely high-tech job estimating and job costing that can help your bottom line.

Because of the number of companies in the market vying for both the printer’s business and the business of the print buyers, there will be tremendous competition among them to offer the greatest feature set, at the best price. This means we will see great innovations that, prior to this marketplace phenomenon, would have only been available to companies that would internally develop software or spend an enormous amount of money to buy sophisticated software packages (along with service fees to the vendor, and internal staff to support them.)

We basically get all the benefits, but for what amounts to a small monthly fee that in some cases is similar to what you would pay a company like ADP to do your payroll. Thinking of these vendors in this way, you may start to realize that the real offered far outweigh any perceived loss of control.

Advantages to the buyer

Clearly, a lot of the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that exists around e-commerce in the printing industry is based on the fact that many of these companies have aggressively targeted the printing company’s customers. We’ve seen this before in our industry, and to many, this is spelled “get your checkbook out.” Some prominent executives in the printing industry have used stronger words.

When you listen to customers who have endorsed these new systems, it is easy to understand why they are naturally gravitating toward eproduction. A good example of this is Bank of America. Its national Creative Services team, headquartered in San Francisco, California, handles over $50 million in print services. As a user of the Noosh system, says Sue Ward, VP and Director of Commercial Print, “Bank of America is now able to look into the system and see exactly what is going on and where things stand during production.” Prior to using the on-line system, the bank had three separate internal systems, none of which provided the complete picture of where all their jobs were at any given time.

If you are one of Bank of America’s print vendors, you’re going to have a difficult time saying no when they ask you to participate in this scenario. Fortunately, the e-commerce providers have listened to feedback, and have changed their approach and pricing models to be much more printer-friendly. This includes, on the part of some of the vendors, no charge to the printer—only the print buyers are charged transaction fees on jobs run through the system. This makes a lot of sense, since in order to obtain the benefits inherent in the systems for a print buyer, their company would previously have had to buy many thousands of dollars worth of software and systems to get the same result.

Printing as a commodity?

Another big uncertainty that printing companies have with e-commerce is that their business will look like a commodity in the marketplace. A big objection is that price will become the only consideration that the buyer cares about when purchasing print through these systems. While it is beginning to appear that this just isn’t true, it is certainly a valid concern.

To address these issues, companies like Collabria, printCafe, httprint, Printable and others are all focusing their development and marketing on the printing community, rather than the print buyers. When you, as a printing company, choose to work with one of these vendors, the end benefit will be either a procurement site branded with your company’s name, or an extension of your existing web site that provides the e-commerce functionality. Customers see your brand, with the e-commerce vendor’s technology behind it.

Sunnyvale, California printing company R.W. Nielsen implemented the Collabria system, and uses it as a sales tool when calling on new prospects. According to Eric Nielsen, the firm’s president, “We send them to a demo site Collabria has set up that’s branded with our logo. When it piques someone’s interest, we give them a complete demonstration and leave them with the URL, password and user ID on the demo site so they can explore on their own. We haven’t had one demo where people say, ‘I’m not interested in this.’”

These systems will charge you a fee, typically either for setting up the system, and then a small transaction charge for each completed job. Some just charge the transaction fee and provide the setup at no charge to help you get started. Many printers feel this approach is a less intrusive way of “going e”.

More than one system

According to a recently circulated Trendwatch FastFact (#80, June 27^th, 2000, find out more at www.trendwatch.com), only 4% of print businesses are using a “dotcom” company. While that may be true at this time, it doesn’t seem like a number that will remain static.

One particularly important reason to align your company with an e-commerce vendor early, is, as discussed previously, the possibility that your customers may end up choosing one of these systems for you. Worse, they could choose more than one system for you. The possibility is very real that, just as we’ve all had to keep copies of PageMaker and Quark installed on our Macintosh computers, we may now have to subscribe to more than one e-commerce system and have our staff learn how to use them.

Some printers, like R. R. Donnelley, MailWell and Consolidated Graphics, have already announced relationships with e-commerce providers. In our next installment, we’ll talk to some of these companies and find out how they chose their vendors and what drove them to be proactive about making this move.

It is possible that by embracing a system early, doing your due diligence and educating your employees, your company can substantially influence how your customers will adopt these technologies. This will not only prevent a loss of control for your company, but more than likely will result in your company becoming a leader in this important area and providing new benefits to customers that will make them more loyal to your company.

Existing Systems and Infrastructure

As these service providers extend their reach, one big issue is how they will interface to our existing systems. For our companies to reap the benefits inherent in “e-production”, we will need integration.

One of the features I like most about using my American Express card is that I can download the monthly statement detail into Quicken on my home PC. This is a very rudimentary example of the type of integration that we can initially expect from these services. But we’re going to need more, and soon.

We must be able to plug the data from these services into our accounting and estimating systems and look at historical data from jobs that are complete. We’re going to want to upload our production data into these systems so we can use it to job cost and benchmark that data against prospective new jobs we’re going to bid on.

Beyond the accounting systems, we’ll need to have an interface to our workflow and scheduling systems that will allow us to integrate the production information we need. We need both content (i.e., production files) and context (the information about the jobs: accounting, personnel, scheduling, etc. which is sometimes referred to as “metadata”) in the systems to have them really benefit our manufacturing operations.

Perhaps the most ambitious company in this area is printCafe. They have acquired several companies that are deeply involved in the IT area of a large number of printing companies, both MIS (management information systems) and production. Their goal is to seamlessly integrate both the e-commerce aspects of e-production and IT functions of the printing company into one neat package. The business integration of the many companies they’ve acquired will be quite a chore unto itself, but if successful (and there’s no reason to doubt they won’t be), this could be the system to beat.

Finally, these systems may require changes to your current IT infrastructure in order for them to work. For example, do all your personnel have access to the corporate LAN and/or a robust Internet connection?

Emerging trends

While a tremendous amount of seemingly proprietary technology is being built in the labs of companies from Boston to Silicon Valley, a number of groups have emerged that seek to enable these systems to communicate and inter-operate with one another. These groups may be able to fulfill the promise of “e-production” efficiencies that current services alone may not be able to provide.

The first such group to emerge is printCafe’s PCX (eProduction eCommerce eXchange) initiative, which is a specification for companies to interface to the printCafe system, and, potentially each other’s disparate systems. This group includes Digital Art Exchange, Inc. (DAX), 58k.com, Group Logic, httprint, MAN Roland, MediaFlex.com.

In May, 2000 Quad/Graphics, Quebecor World, R.R. Donnelley and Banta announced that they are working together to create “supply-chain efficiencies for industry participants worldwide by establishing standards and leveraging enabling technologies”. These efforts include what they are calling XPP, which stands for “XML for Printers and Publishers”. According to their press release, they believe that working together they will “enable customers who frequently work with multiple print providers to streamline the print process in areas such as job planning and administration. The companies will also address standards and common interfaces for administering the procurement of materials such as paper. The group will encourage broad participation among printers, customers and suppliers worldwide with the goal of enhancing industry relationships.” On July 5^th, 2000 these companies announced the inclusion of publishing company partners Meredith Corporation, Reader’s Digest Association and The New York Times Company in their efforts.

Another group has also announced a sort of consortium of vendors to promote XML standards for inter-system communication. This group is calling itself PrintTalk and includes Noosh, Impresse, Collabria, Parsec, Graphic Arts IT, Printers Software, Inc., Streamline Solutions, and Profit Control Systems. The group has begun work on an interface specification that is based on cXML (Commercial eXtensible Markup Language) and Adobe’s JDF (Job Definition Format) specification.

Summary

To quote Mills Davis, CXO and Sr. VP, Consulting Services, printCafe, “The urgency to get on with it comes from a sense that this new platform is like water freezing. It's a change of state where all the rules change. You don't want to be caught below the ice, or stuck in it. You want to be on top of it and put on your skates”.

“The process of freezing the pond may be complex, but once the water freezes, nobody will care which parts of the pond froze first. We'll just have a simple, solid foundation to skate on. The technologies beneath the Internet are very complex, but you can get to anywhere on it with a simple point and click.”

I believe it… do you?

SIDEBAR ABOUT PRINTPLANET.COM/EPRODUCTION FORUM

To find out more about the topics discussed in this article, and about e-commerce for the printing industry in general, check out the eProduction forum on PrintPlanet.com (www.printplanet.com).

Printplanet.com provides e-communities centered on a variety of topics of interest to graphic communications industry professionals.

The eProduction forum discusses Business to Business eCommerce, eProduction in the publishing world, and allied industries. Specifically process management tools and web-based print buying products available to use in end to end integration of publishing/printing production from conception to delivery. On eProduction, you will find over 1,000 of your fellow industry professional subscribers worldwide engaged in discussions of these topics 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

E-commerce: a positive change for the printing industry? Part 1: The “dot coms”… who are they and what do they do?

Originally appeared in High Volume Printing magazine
By Chuck Gehman

This series of articles will explore the new e-commerce companies that are taking the printing industry by storm. From print buying to supplies procurement, there are new “dot com” companies that want to put themselves in the middle of almost every transaction a graphic arts company will make.

At this writing, there are at least 40 Internet companies addressing the specific needs of the printing industry. The most incredible fact about that number is that as recently as last year at this time, most of us would be hard pressed to identify even one company that could be described as a printing industry e-commerce company. Even more astounding is that more of these companies are launching their businesses seemingly everyday.

Some of these companies are “dot com” manifestations of traditional printing industry businesses; these include distributors and actual printing operations who instead of having “brick and mortar” operations choose to place their customer-facing operations on the world wide web. Some sell paper or operate exchanges for other commodities and chemicals.

But perhaps more interesting and controversial, especially to the printer or trade shop in our industry, are the companies that intend to put themselves in the middle of the transaction between buyer and seller. These companies will charge a fee to facilitate the exchange between the buyer and seller. Perhaps the biggest question we’re hearing is: do these companies provide enough value-add to our operations to justify taking a percentage of our sales. Another big fear among printers is that these companies will turn their business in to a commodity, making all the value-added services (and even personal service itself) disappear as a component in the customer relationship, leaving price as the buyer’s only consideration.

In this series of articles, we’ll attempt to give you enough information about these companies to make an educated decision about whether or not there is a value proposition in all this for your company. In this article, we’ll help you identify key companies in the marketplace, what they do and how they operate.

e-commerce business models

For the most part, the graphic arts industry e-commerce companies are all considered “business-to-business” plays (also called B2B). There are basically four different types of business models that are currently in use for B2B companies.

Forward Auction. What most people think of when they think of an auction; sellers post descriptions of products on a web site and buyers post bids to offer to buy the product.

Reverse Auction. Made popular (perhaps “invented”) by Priceline.com. Buyers post descriptions of products and services that they desire to purchase, and companies review the postings and offer (or perhaps do not) products at that price.

Internet Exchange. In this model, multiple buyers and sellers come together in an e-commerce system. A match is made between buyer and seller, with the exchange garnering a transaction fee.

Digital Marketplace or Linked Exchange. This model involves multiple exchanges sharing information and transactions, and paying each other fees or percentages for completing customer transactions.

To get more detail on each of these business models, read “Ways of Doing Business” by Greg Dalton, in the March 6^th, 2000 edition of Industry Standard magazine. In addition to those listed, a couple of other strategies have emerged in the graphic arts arena. These are:

Bulletin Board. Basically, a place on the Internet where buyers can post RFQs and sellers can read them and respond. This is a very loose definition of e-commerce; since basically, you are paying for the privilege of exposing your RFQ to a larger audience (as a buyer), or for the ability to see RFQs from a larger customer community than you may be exposed to by your normal sales channels.

Storefront. An e-commerce company provides a printing company branded e-commerce site, and provides all the backend logic and processing. Makes a company look like they have their own elaborate e-commerce system, but in fact they are using the e-commerce provider’s systems.

Companies serving the graphic arts industry

The sheer quantity of startup “dot com” companies vying for our business makes identifying and categorizing these companies a difficult task. And since their names are not often descriptive of what they do, it makes life even more difficult. For the purposes of our discussion here, we’ve broken down the various industry e-commerce companies into three distinct categories. These are: 1) Intermediaries, or companies that are attempting to broker transactions between buyers and sellers, 2) Online printing companies and 3) Companies selling supplies or trading commodities.

The Intermediaries

Our first category of e-commerce service provider is the intermediary. These are the controversial companies that want to inject themselves in the middle of your transaction and take a fee or percentage of the net or gross of the job.

Table 1 provides information about 11 of the most prominent companies providing e-commerce services to print buyers and sellers in the graphic communications industry. within this category of provider, you will see three prominent models in use by companies addressing our industry: Forward Auction, Bulletin Board and Internet Exchange. In addition, you’ll see multiple e-commerce companies coming to market using the storefront type of offering.

In a future installment, we’ll go into detail about what makes some of these companies unique, and get some feedback from their executives about their approach to the market. For now, let’s just examine what the benefits might be for your company in each of these approaches.

58K.com claims to be the printing industry’s only auction site. This claim appears to be true. Their homepage lists numerous features and benefits to both print buyers and sellers, as well as providing a small window into some of the auctions that are currently taking place in their system. The biggest criticism of auction-style e-commerce is that price is the primary motivation of the buyer, and the sellers may have a difficult time differentiating their products in any other way.

Httprint.com, Printbid.com and Printmarket.com are all examples of bulletin board systems. These systems are typically free to the print buyer, and charge a very small fee to the printer (see table 1 for examples of fees.) However, these systems do not offer a lot of functionality to either community: the primary benefit to a buyer would be to get a larger number of responses to RFQs, or an easier way of distributing them. To the seller (printer), the primary benefit might be more jobs to bid on.

The Internet Exchange category is represented by Impresse.com, Noosh, and Printcafe and Printmarket. These companies appear to be the most heavily funded and most aggressive of all the players attempting to address our industry. They also are generating the most controversy, primarily through their fee schedules (seemingly slanted toward charging the printer more) and their aggressive selling to the print buyers. However they are also offering numerous benefits to both buyers and sellers, and have only just begun to roll out the wide range of features that they have planned for their systems. Impresse and Noosh both come from the high-tech world, with executives from e-commerce and database companies at their helms; Printcafe is a unique conglomeration of graphic arts industry hardware and software companies.

Finally, the storefront approach is being implemented by Collabria (the most prominent player in this category), Mediaflex.com, and Printchannel.com. These companies charge an upfront fee to create the web site and e-commerce environment for the printing company, then take a small transaction fee (typically a flat fee) for jobs completed through the system. These systems are appealing to printers primarily because they preserve branding (“I’d rather have my company name in the buyers face than someone else’s”). However, this could backfire if buyers gravitate to the exchanges, because no one wants to have to learn how to use lots of different systems to place an order.

Online Printing Companies

The next category of industry e-commerce companies are the online printing companies. We’ve compiled a list of six of the more prominent players in this category in table 2. Some of these companies are Internet manifestations of existing companies that have been around for many years (namely, e-printshop.com and Easiest.com).

Postcard.com has been doing “e” a little bit longer, by virtue of the fact that they have always operated as a virtual printing company (doing business via 800 numbers primarily and aggregating small jobs to larger printers).

Imagex is an Internet-oriented companies that has executives from high tech, is well funded and moving aggressively into many different segments of the market. Imagex is a unique public company and they have purchased quite a few other graphic arts/Internet companies in the recent past (most recently Creativepro.com); we’ll talk about Imagex in particular and their various companies in the next installment in this series.

Mimeo is a company whose young executives are from the Internet world. Founder and CEO Jeff Stewart (30 years old) could be described as a “serial entrepreneur.” Iprint.com is also an Internet-oriented company whose founder came from one of the earliest Macintosh software companies and offers an easy way to buy the most basic printing needs that a small business might have.

In a future article in this series, we’ll talk to some of the executives of these companies and get their impressions on the directions the industry is going, and how they feel they will be affected by the emergence of the various e-commerce models and exchange-type companies we discussed earlier.

Buying supplies online

Finally, several companies have emerged that are selling or providing exchange or auction sites for the commodities and supplies that are used by our industry. Table 3 lists seven of these companies, their mission and scope. Paper seems to be the “hot commodity” for e-commerce in our industry, with five of the seven companies focused on this segment of the marketplace. We’ll talk more about these companies in a later installment.

The other two companies, Printnation and Street-price.com are taking aim at the traditional graphic arts distributors. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this category is that none of the large, existing distributors have publicly shown any interest or technology for providing their products and services over the Internet. The biggest criticism of these new “dot coms” is that they have missed two of the largest reasons why people do business with the traditional distributors: First, because they are “the bankers of the industry”, providing credit and consumables rebate deals to help service providers make ends meet and second, because their “feet on the street” and personal relationships mean so much to companies in our industry.

Summary

We’ve established the basis for discussion of this fascinating new world of Internet applications for our industry and identified some of the key who want to forever change the way we all do business. In our next installment, we’ll get to know some of the executives of these companies and talk to some of their customers.

Remote Proofing

Originally appeared in the GATF EPS Newsletter

April 2000

By Chuck Gehman

Remote Proofing has become a very hot topic. There are a number of key factors that have converged to bring this issue to the forefront. Among these are: The availability of low cost, high quality proofing devices, readily available network bandwidth (whether it be over a private network or the Internet), and of course, tighter deadlines and the need to cut time out of the production process and the traditionally iterative creative process.

While remote proofing is of interest to many people, there is also a lot of confusion surrounding the process, including misconceptions about what is required to do this, and how well it works. We’ve already mentioned low cost and high quality. That alone might be enough to stop a lot of people who still think Remote Proofing requires a T-1 line, expensive, specialized hardware and software and perhaps a Kodak Approval. While that is certainly something that people are doing, there is much more to it than the very high end, and I’ll attempt to address some of the fundamental issues as well as provide some “nuts and bolts” information that can apply to both high-end users and entry level users.

We won’t spend a lot of time talking about ICC color profiles and color management, but instead will focus primarily on workflow issues and how to deliver the files to the remote site. We’re going to assume that the reader has a good working knowledge of digital proofing and the issues that surround it. The color science behind getting matching proofs on two different devices may actually be pretty close to rocket science, but fortunately, being successful with remote proofing isn’t.

Why Remote Proofing?

Remote proofing is a topic of hot debate among knowledgeable technical people in the graphic arts. Why? Perhaps because everyone has their own definition of what is considered remote proofing. We aren’t going to attempt to resolve that debate here, but to point out several applications where this technique can add great value.

The very first thing that needs to be understood about remote proofing: Unless you are already in a relationship (whether you are the service provider or the client) that has adopted digital proofing as a standard way of working, you are never going to be able to implement a remote proofing workflow. So, perhaps obviously, digital proofs first, remote proof second.

Where are the big wins for remote proofing? They are certainly in the creative process, such as between an Ad Agency and their service providers. Between a prepress house and a printer (perhaps for imposition proofs). Between a printer and a catalog publisher. Certainly, between an ad agency and their corporate client. Even between in-house creatives in a large company, or in a workflow with packaging designers for a consumer products company. I’m sure we can all think of many more useful applications for this technology. The key is that both production and creative stand to benefit from this workflow.

Workflow

Perhaps obviously, the device and the technical implementation you choose for remote proofing must match your existing workflow, and/or that of your customer. For instance, if you are using a Kodak Approval at your site, and your customer is using an Epson Inkjet, you’re going to need to generate a file that is suitable for the Epson without having to add multiple steps to the process. There are workflows and RIPs available from a number of vendors that can make that happen for you. Of course, they cost money. Some that come to mind that might be particularly useful are the Scitex Brisque, and the products from Shira Corporation and Rorke Data. We won’t discuss these products in great detail and it isn’t necessary to invest large amounts of money in these technologies to do remote proofing. If you already have this equipment and/or software, however, you’re halfway there and you may not know it.

If many additional manual steps are necessary to generate the file to be sent to the remote proofer, it has been our experience that the remote proofing project will fail. And we say “and/or”, because if you are supplying the communications lines and the proofer, you are probably going to be able to fully control the steps you will have to take to deliver the proof. This makes your life a little easier and puts you in total control of the workflow. If you supply the device and the connection, you probably won’t want your customer to use the output device for their own purposes. This will also make the whole process more expensive for you.

If the customer is using the output device for their own purposes, or let’s say, they own it and are letting you output to it from your remote site, they may want to maintain full control over the device. In that case, you may be delivering your proofs into a queue (for example, in the case of a trade shop delivering files to an ad agency’s Fiery-type device or other color digital copier front-end.) When you’ve delivered the file, you send your customer an email (we’ve implemented setups where this is done automatically) that the file is in the queue. When your customer is ready to output, they go into their screen and move your job from “hold” to “active”.

If you own the proofing device, and the communications lines, you’re going to have to decide if you want the customer to be able to print their own work on the output device. This means that you may have to keep track of how many prints the customer makes that aren’t related to your work with the customer. You’ll want to recover the costs of the supplies for any work you aren’t generating. You’ll also have a higher likelihood of media jams and service calls for the proofer, because chances are the customer will have multiple users taking advantage of the cool color printer. Finally, if the proofer becomes very popular at the customer site, you may have to wait in line to get your proofs delivered over the remote connection. This is a big issue to consider.

Communications Lines

First of all, before you say, “I’m going to use the Internet for remote proofing,” or, “Let’s use ISDN for remote proofing”, you need to consider the frequency and volume of the file transfers to the remote proofing device. The next issue will be economics: How much bandwidth can you afford to make this connection happen. This will help you determine what type of technology is right for you. After all, remote proofing at it’s most basic level is a special purpose file transfer. Fortunately, the line you put in for remote proofing can typically also be used to support other applications (i.e., a robust, high speed Internet connection will serve many purposes besides the remote proofing application.)

A rule of thumb when selecting what type and size of communication line to use is what we call “the one hour rule”. Simply put, this rule says if any proof will take more than an hour to deliver, you need to examine other options for communication. For example, with a single direct ISDN line you can deliver about 50 megabytes in an hour. A dedicated, private T-1 line (from your site to a single remote site), can deliver upwards of 600 megabytes per hour. Internet file transfer speeds can vary depending on the ISP and type of connection you have purchased, but with a Tier-1 Internet T-1, you can expect reliable delivery of over 400mb per hour.

A direct connect ISDN setup is a viable option particularly when there are strong security needs (i.e., the customer won’t let you deliver their jobs over the Internet—a rarity these days, with advanced encryption techniques and more savvy IT departments at corporations.) Combining multiple ISDN lines can achieve performance of as much as 200mb per hour.

Dedicated T-1 lines are practical only when the customer is a relatively short distance away (private T-1 lines are priced by the distance), or the volume is so high that a line dedicated for this application just makes economic sense.

Frame Relay networks can be practical for multiple sites that are often sending to one another. A good example of this is a distribute and print type of application, but that really is a whole other ballgame. Perhaps a better example would be a greeting card company with a central design site and several manufacturing facilities. Proofs might need to be generated often at each of the manufacturing sites, or conversely at the design site from work done at each of the printing plants.

Perhaps the best communication technology of all for remote proofing applications is the Internet. Since we all need to have an Internet connection anyway (for email, digital job deliveries, research and web surfing and the emerging e-commerce applications), why not use the same pipe for this application.

For an Internet connection to work for remote proofing, it must be an “up-all-the-time” connection. Modems will not cut it, because of their low speed and low reliability. ISDN Internet services typically can’t be used, because they are “dial-up” services just like analog modems and you won’t be able to predict in all cases when to dial-up the line so the proof can be delivered.

The lowest cost of the always-on Internet services is called DSL (Digital Subscriber Line.) DSL, at this writing, is available in about 30 cities nationwide but availability is growing quickly. You’re going to want a type of connection called Symmetrical DSL (SDSL) not Asymmetrical (ADSL – the type of DSL you see advertised on a billboard for $39.00/month). The difference is that with SDSL, you have the same speed sending and receiving, which is essential for graphic arts applications. ADSL is designed for web surfing, where downloading is much, much faster than uploading because the service providers expect you to click once, then watch a web site or streaming video link come onto your screen. ADSL is perfect for home, but not useful for graphic arts file transfer or remote proofing.

SDSL is available in speeds ranging from 128K (the same speed as an ISDN line—about 50mb can be delivered in an hour) up to 1.544mbps (the same speed as a T-1 or as much as 400mb per hour.) Keep in mind that DSL availability is not guaranteed, even in the areas of the country where the service is offered. And distance and other telephone company technical issues can often prevent the service from being installed at your site at all, or may limit you to a slower speed. Typically, if available, you will get speed choices of 128K and 384K.

Cable Modems have sort of come and gone from the hype of the telecom world, with most people realizing that it’s going to be a long time before any sort of business-class, generally available service that uses broadband digital cable will be obtainable to our business locations. When and if this happens, these services do offer an “up all the time” type of service, and may be able to provide the high-performance, reliable type of service that we in the graphic arts require.

Beyond DSL, you’re looking at Internet T-1 or even multiple Internet T-1 (a popular new option called “N by T or NxT”, which combines T-1 lines into a bigger connection) lines for high performance Internet service. To do remote proofing over the Internet, you will need to use a Tier-1 Internet provider. These are the companies (typically household names like AT&T, MCI/Worldcom or Sprint) who own the large backbone networks. These companies are able to provide uncongested, reliable bandwidth for mission critical applications like remote proofing. As we discussed before, an Internet T-1 line can deliver as much as 400mb per hour to a remote site; but not if you are using a local ISP who has oversold or “oversubscribed” his bandwidth by an order of 10 to 1 (meaning he’s sold 10 times the bandwidth he has contracted for to the Internet backbone… not uncommon today.) We call this oversubscription “the healthclub model”, and isn’t going to provide great performance for your remote proofing application.

As the Internet becomes more reliable and demonstrates even higher performance than available today (something which is happening very quickly with the billions of dollars being pumped into it), we expect virtually all remote proofing applications will take place over the Internet. With new technology such as RealTimeProof (discussed later) and the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), a new standards-based printing architecture from Hewlett-packard and Microsoft coming online, this will become easier and easier.

Delivering the Proofs

We’ve covered the most popular technologies for digital delivery. We now have a pipe to send the files from your site to the remote site. Now let’s talk about how to get the files on the output device at the remote end.

Some of the most popular and affordable proofing devices are the Imation Rainbow, the Polaroid DryJet and PolaProof (the newer, smaller format unit is especially popular for remote proofing) and the Epson 5000. Each of these units uses a different technology for imaging the proof. They all come with various software packages to handle the digital files. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to describe all the different proofing technologies and printing methods these devices use. The good news is, over the last couple of years, there have emerged three easy, standards-based ways to deliver files to these proofers.

First, is the hotfolder method. All the above units can support delivery by hotfolder, and just about every professional quality machine that we’ve investigated supports this method. This means that there is a folder on the machine that runs the RIP (whether it be a Macintosh or a Windows NT machine, or a proprietary RIP like the Fiery in the Epson.) The RIP software is monitoring that folder and when a file is dropped into it, the RIP picks it up and begins to image the file. Typically, the file that will be delivered to this hotfolder is a Postscript file. That means that at the end of the connection generating the file, the user must print to a file, and use a PPD (Postscript Printer Description) file that matches the target output device. This is extremely important, because if you do not set up the PPD to match the destination proofer, it is very possible that the print job will cause an error on the device, and you will have to re-create and re-send the file.

The second method uses the “desktop printer” on the Macintosh. Later versions of the Macintosh operating system (from system 8 on up) support this method. Basically, it is possible to drop a file onto the desktop printer, which subsequently sends the file to that device. We use a simple Macintosh-based FTP Server called NetPresenz (from an Australian software developer called Stairways Software) to deliver the files to the desktop printer. We have also used this software for “hot folder”-based applications as described above. The best thing about using this method is that you can deliver a proof to almost any output device. As long as the printer or proofer is available in the Macintosh “chooser”, you can use this method for remote proofing. This opens up a wide range of printers that can be used for remote proofing applications, from the least expensive (i.e., $199.00) InkJet on up.

There are some caveats to both of these methods. First and foremost, you need to make sure that when the file arrives and is dropped onto the hotfolder, that it is all there (i.e., a complete file transfer.) This sounds strange, but it is possible when using some software to deliver the file to the destination machine, that the hotfolder will pick up a “partial” copy of the file. This will result in the file not imaging at all, or generating an error on the proofer. A good workaround to this is to use an applescript on a Mac-based RIP proofer. Deliver the file to one folder, make sure it has been completely received, then have the Applescript drop it into the hotfolder. Applescripts that do this sort of thing are easy to create and you should be able to find one on the Internet that someone else has already created for this purpose.

Second, there isn’t a lot of error checking with either of these methods. Once the file is delivered and imaging starts, you’re pretty much holding your breath until the proof comes out. That’s the bad news. The good news is, these methods are actually very, very reliable and with a little testing you’ll generate useable proofs almost every time.

Finally, we mentioned a third method of delivering the files. This is referred to as LPR, which is a standard Unix method that has been around for many years. It is supported by the Fiery RIPs, the Windows NT-based Harlequin RIP used with the and by standard Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers with the Microsoft TCP/IP printing services (an add-on option that is free.) Any RIP that runs on a Unix machine will be able to support printing with this protocol.

Consumables Issues

Someone has to change the consumables (i.e., the proofing media, toner, ink, what have you) in the proofer. And someone has to pay for them. And someone has to maintain the device and calibrate it. This is one of the most important and neglected aspects of making remote proofing a success. Without considering this point and putting procedures in place to handle these issues, the project will fail.

If you are paying for the device at the remote end, you are probably going to have to be responsible for the consumables. You may be able to convince your customer to assign a staffer to the care and feeding of the proofer. This will be difficult, because calibration alone can take 15 minutes to half an hour on most devices. You will also have to replenish the consumables, and just getting someone at the client to tell you that they’ve run out or are getting low can be a problem. You certainly don’t want to run out of supplies when you are on a deadline. You especially don’t want this to happen on a Friday afternoon, when it’ll be next to impossible to get the supplies to the site in time for a weekend of production.

You may want to consider contracting with a graphic arts dealer to periodically visit the site. Once you have a regular workflow, and know what the frequency and volume of the output will be, you’ll be able to set up a calendar with your dealer for the visits. Keep in mind that it may be necessary to calibrate the proofer more often than you will require additional consumables. In major metropolitan areas, this shouldn’t be an issue-- the dealer personnel are more than likely in the area of your customer on a regular basis and can stop by to perform the calibration. If the customer site is more remote, you may need to go back to plan A and have someone on staff learn how to run the calibration routine.

There are going to be times when you have media jams or other problems with the device. The same dealer we talked about above can handle maintenance issues; preventive maintenance performed when the consumables are replenished can preempt certain types of problems from happening. But there will be times when the equipment breaks and you’ll need to plan for these eventualities. In a high volume, mission critical application, this might require having a second printer onsite as a standby. Or having 24 by 7 maintenance on the device, so you can dispatch a technician no matter when the failure occurs. It also might going back to using Fedex for shipping hardcopy proofs, or it might mean using one of the new product mentioned below to suffice with a softproof instead of hardcopy.

In the case of the less expensive InkJet printers, all of these issues become less important. If the printer fails, you can probably go out and buy a new one while you wait for the broken one to be repaired by the manufacturer. And it’s affordable to keep a spare onsite. Of course, what you gain in simplicity and low-cost, you sacrifice in print quality.

New products

A few new products have recently come out that should be of interest to anyone considering implementing remote proofing.

First, there is a new product called RealTimeProof (DAX currently offers this as DAXProof) from a new company called RealTimeImage, Inc. in San Mateo, California. This Internet-based service supports softproofing (i.e., on-screen proofing) including a tool set that lets you measure color (RGB and CMYK), dimensioning and to place notes on the image for discussion with other participants. It runs in a web browser with a plug-in, and is a service that you pay for as you use, rather than having to buy software or equipment. The service also delivers proofs to a remote site hardcopy proofer.

RealTimeProof has it’s own compression and encryption built-in (for speed and security, respectively), as well as support for ICC color profiles and it is very easy to use. It works with all the popular file formats (you don’t have to create postscript first… you simply upload the image or page file to the server) and virtually any output device.

Another new product of great interest is Adobe’s PressReady. The list price is only $249.00 and it is basically an Adobe RIP that runs on the Macintosh or on Windows NT. This product makes a variety of low cost InkJet printers from Epson, Cannon and Hewlett-Packard into viable postscript output devices. To quote Adobe’s literature on the product, “PressReady prints are intended to help communicate your intentions to your client and your print provider, but they are not intended to replace final/contract proofs.” Fortunately, this is one of the “big bang” applications for remote proofing: Cutting down on the iterations in the creative process.

PressReady supports ICC color profiles supporting industry standards like SWOP, Euroscale and Japan Standard, enabling you to generate output that simulates that you would obtain on a particular printing press.

Microsoft Windows 2000 also promises to provide a really great new platform for remote proofing applications. Microsoft has integrated printing with their Internet architecture in this new operating system. Printers will now have URLs, just like web sites (i.e., myprinter.mycompany.com) and you will be able to choose this URL as an output device for programs running on Windows NT. An example from Microsoft’s Window 2000 fact sheet says “a mail-order company can send its new catalog directly to the publisher's printer, provided the mail order company has permission from the publisher and the URL of the publisher's printer.” It shouldn’t be difficult to support this from Macintosh-based client computers, either, since you can already use Windows NT spoolers from the Mac, and Windows 2000 has much better support for Macintosh clients than previous versions of Windows.

In Summary

Remote Proofing is indeed a viable tool for speeding up the production cycle and cutting down on time consuming delivery of proofs via FedEx or couriers. It doesn’t take a huge amount of resources to get started using this productive workflow, and it can be a tremendous value-add in the increasingly competitive marketplace in which we find ourselves today.

On a personal note, DAX was formed on the proverbial napkin on the basis of a remote proofing project back in 1995. Back then, it was incredibly difficult to implement this type of workflow successfully. Two of the founders of DAX (one at the time working for Scitex, one a well known industry consultant) had a client who wanted to do remote proofing from New York to their customer in Boston. In those days, you really needed to be a telecom guru to do such a project. Needless to say, we’ve come a long way in 5 years!

Identifying Genuine Value in Application Service Providers (ASPs) for the Graphic Communications Industry

Originally appeared on Printwriter.com

By Chuck Gehman

In a very short period of time, the business world has seen the widespread adoption of a whole new category of company, the Application Service Provider (ASP.) The graphic arts industry, as with many other vertical markets, is the target market for quite a few of these new companies.

Some think of ASPs in terms of e-commerce, but that is really only one example of the types of services these companies can offer. The ASP Consortium, www.asp.com, an industry trade association, defines Application Service Providers as follows:

“An ASP deploys, hosts and manages access to packaged application(s) to multiple parties from a centrally managed facility. The applications are delivered over networks on a subscription basis. This delivery model speeds implementation, minimizes the expenses and risks incurred across the application life cycle, and overcomes the chronic shortage of qualified technical personnel available in-house.”

This is a very basic definition, and it addresses all software in the context of the ASP model. But there’s a lot more going on: ASPs are both providing an alternative delivery mechanism (i.e., instead of installing servers and software at the customer premise, providing those applications to workstations over the network), and second, providing applications that are actually made possible by using the network.

There’s been a lot of confusion regarding ASPs in the graphic arts arena, mainly because these companies don’t offer the usual products that companies in our industry have grown accustomed to. They don’t sell printing presses. They typically don’t make shrink-wrap software. They don’t make plate-setters or RIPs.

In the graphic arts industry, we’re seeing ASPs delivering primarily entirely new applications that aren’t possible to provide without the network connectivity in place, both because of cost and maintenance issues, but more importantly because of the collaborative functionality. But it’s entirely likely that, someday, instead of going out and buying a shrink-wrap copy of Adobe InDesign, you’ll simply subscribe to it over the Internet. That’s why ASP is such an exciting concept.

Core vs. Context

As a business person today, it’s important for you to look at what your company is good at, and identify those that will provide value to your customers. Printing companies are really good at putting ink on paper.

But printing companies don’t make that ink and paper. They know how to buy the ink and paper, and that’s a core competency. But making the ink and paper wouldn’t add anything to the printing company’s bottom line. In fact, it would be costly and complicated.

Over the last few years, most printing companies have also gotten really good at digital imaging, to facilitate putting that ink on the paper. But printing companies don’t typically create applications like Quark or Adobe Photoshop. Why? Because doing so is not a core part of their business. It’s easier to go out and buy those applications and put them to use to drive the core business.

Most small and medium-sized companies these days have outsourced their payroll to companies like ADP. Why? Because they are better at keeping track of the taxes and deductions and things like that, and make the process much less labor intensive for the accounting department. Accounting can then focus on areas that will drive the bottom line, like purchasing, cost of goods sold and controlling expenses and generally looking at the bigger picture.

How does this relate to ASP and the graphic arts industry? It’s simple: installing and maintaining computer equipment and software, networks and applications are not core functionality to the business of a printing company.

What are appropriate applications for ASPs?

ASPs are basically providing the same type of service to printers that a company like ADP does, or perhaps even an Adobe. But again, we need to get away from the thought process that so many in the graphic arts believe, and that is ASP is are e-commerce companies. ASP goes far beyond e-commerce.

Today, providers can deliver a wide variety of applications, including collaboration tools, proofing tools, even Page Layout and Imaging functionality.

Why not build it yourself?

I’ve been to some printing companies where they are lucky to have some very ingenious software and systems people. But in recent years, it’s become harder for our industry to attract and keep people with these skill sets. The norm in our industry is to not have an IT department at all, but instead depend on the good will of our best Mac guy or an estimator who happens to like to tinker with PCs as a hobby.

This means that we’re basically putting our company in the hands of a non-professional for mission critical, information age tasks that are increasingly valuable to our company. And this means that the company is forever going to be in reactive mode vis-à-vis technology, as opposed to having a technology and application strategy that will move the company ahead.

If you do have a real IT staff, you’re probably a good sized company, but, even though there are dedicated resources, you’re probably finding that they are still busy just keeping your basic functions up and running, again because these are viewed as support functions – not core business operations.

In order to build the kind of systems that ASPs are creating today, you’d have to put together a world-class software engineering team inside your own company. It’s not too far away from deciding to build your own Adobe Photoshop from scratch. When you think about it in this light, it becomes apparent quickly that ASPs actually have a very compelling value proposition for your company.

The Importance of Selecting a Graphic Communications Industry Focused Internet Service Provider (ISP)

Originally appeared in the GATF EPS Newsletter
December 1999

By Chuck Gehman

The Internet has become a much more prominent player in digital workflows for the graphic communications industry and the Internet will continue to take a front seat as we move into the millennium. Is your company prepared to embrace this technology and have you carefully considered all the components before incorporating this technology seamlessly into your workflow?

There are a number of components to examine before driving full speed ahead with the Internet. The most critical component or the component that could make or break corporate Internet strategies is selecting an appropriate ISP. An appropriate ISP for graphic communications companies can be defined as a network service provider that offers the performance, speed and support required for today’s digital workflows.

The Internet in graphic communications workflows has a different set of needs than the Internet used in the home or for general business applications. The graphic communications industry requires networks that provide high speed and reliability, if it is going to support large file transfers, multi-site collaborations and special applications like on-line job submission and tracking. It is possible to obtain the kind of quality of service benchmarks graphic communications professionals need. If you understand what you are purchasing and chose an ISP with an appropriate level of expertise and dedication to the graphic communications industry, you’ll be able to embrace the Internet and drive full speed ahead.

There are a considerable number of acronyms in this white paper, in the trade press and, frankly, on the Internet in general. We’ve tried to define all the acronyms used in this paper as they are used, but for further clarification, check out DAX’s on-line connectivity glossary of terms at www.dax-it.com.

Who’s driving the Internet?

By now, most people understand that the Internet is a “Network of Networks” that appears to operate as one, large seamless network. No one owns the Internet, no one controls it or manages it, and yet somehow it works. While we say that the Internet is not owned by anyone, it is actually owned by many. Large telephone companies and ISPs, Universities and Government Agencies (both in the US and abroad) and private companies have all contributed signifcantly to the development of the Internet as we know it today, and each own or manage large pieces of it.

Today, a collection of organizations control the relevant technologies of the Internet. These are the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), the Internic (Operated by Network Solutions, Inc. under a US federal government mandate.) Soon, the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will have significant control of the registration of Domain Names (i.e., www.yourcompany.com) on an international basis. While none of these organizations have complete control over the Internet, each of these organizations exert their authority over the Internet by having their membership made up of the people who are involved in creating, maintaining and using the Internet. For instance, the head of the IETF is Fred Baker from Cisco Systems (they are the largest provider of equipment used to transport Internet traffic.) Other members come from industry, academia and the federal government.

The entire focus of this paper could be spent talking about these organizations, what they do and how they influence the development of Internet standards to keep this network of networks operating. The purpose of this discussion is the state of the Internet today and we have now provided enough background information to assist you in the ISP selection process. Your selection of an ISP is especially critical when you are planning to incorporate the Internet into your production workflow.

The Backbones

In the human body, the backbone is your spine, carrying the impulses that allow your central nervous system to function.The Internet backbone today provides this same “central nervous system function”, but there isn’t just one backbone (a few years ago, there was only one, owned by the government.) Today, the Internet is made up of an interwoven fabric of large, ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) backbone networks that are owned by telephone companies and large ISPs, connected together through public and private “peering points.” Types of peering and peering points will be addressed later.

A company that owns a national or international backbone is called a “Tier 1” Internet Service Provider (ISP.) This is the top of the line ISP. A Tier 1 provider has made huge investments in infrastructure- from Fiber Optic Cable to ATM Switches and giant Routers. Tier 1 ISPs are committed to the Internet business for the long haul and have invested billions of dollars to ensure it’s success. These companies include: AT&T, MCI/Worldcom, GTE Internet, Digex, PSINet, Qwest, and several other companies. Note that some of these companies are both ISPs and telephone companies. Interestingly, some of the most well known Internet companies are NOT Tier 1 ISPs.

AOL (America Online), for example, is not a Tier 1 ISP. They are actually, by definition, a Tier 2 provider. AOL does not own it’s own network- although one wouldn’t be aware of that fact as a user of AOL, and in fact, at one time they did own a backbone. AOL now buys their network capacity from Tier 1 providers, like MCI/Worldcom and GTE Internetworking. Other well-known examples of Tier 2 ISPs are Earthlink (it’s networks are provided by PSINet and Sprint) and Mindspring (again, buying their network from PSINet. The definition of a Tier 2 is that they have made a significant investment in infrastructure and marketing, as the above examples demonstrate very well, but Tier 2 providers do not own their own national or international backbone networks.

Next are the Tier 3 ISPs. Tier 3 ISPs typically operate on a regional or local basis. They may purchase their capacity from a Tier 1, but they don’t buy in the bulk quantities that the Tier 2s do, so they typically don’t get the same level of service that the bigger players do. They may also get their service from other small providers (like another Tier 3.) This is the nature of the complex web of relationships that make up the Internet today.

Finally, there are companies further down the food chain than the Tier 3s, and they would be considered Tier 4 or 5 ISPs. I will not name any of these companies, but their networks are characterized by extremely poor performance and less than mediocre customer service. Their poor performance is caused by the fact that they are several networks away from any of the large Internet backbones, causing any traffic to or from their customers to go through a variety of equipment and congestion points.

Now that we’ve defined the playing field and the players, let’s compare the services offered by these various companies. You will begin to see that there is a wide range of service offerings provided by these various organizations, and they can be hard to distinguish without asking the right questions.

Peering

The quality level of the Tier 1 providers tends to be superior. In fact, if your site is directly connected to a Tier 1 ISP’s, you will get above average Internet performance. When we say above average performance, we’re talking about achieving stated throughput objectives across the network (there aren’t long delays in sending or receiving files or accessing web sites), network availability (i.e., your circuit doesn’t unexpectedly go down or performance routinely slow down to a crawl), and technical support.

Typically, if the site you are connecting to is ALSO on a Tier 1 network, AND the two backbone networks are connected together in a robust way you will experience maximum Internet productivity. The point in the Internet where two Internet backbone networks come together is called “peering”, and the way this is done can have a huge impact on the performance you achieve over the Internet. There are two types of peering- public and private.

Public peering occurs at places known as MAEs (Metropolitan Area Exchange) or NAPs (Network Access Point). These are facilities that have been setup by a carrier or a group of carriers that provide the infrastructure where the various backbone networks connect. For example, MCI/Worldcom owns one of the biggest, most heavily trafficked public peering facilities - it’s called MAE EAST. MAE stands for “Metropolitan Area Exchange.” MAE EAST is basically a big room in Reston, Virginia where there is an enormous quantity of networking equipment sitting in racks and even more fiber optic telecom cables bringing in Internet networks from all over the country. To have a connection at one or more of the public peering points is essential for a large ISP. There are two other MAEs – one in California (MAE WEST) and one in Texas (MAE CENTRAL.) While ISPs need to be connected through the MAEs and other public peering points, these connection points tend to be heavily trafficked and can be congested at times—leading ISPs who want to provide better performance arrange “private peering” with other providers.

Private Peering is when one or more ISPs arrange with one another to connect their networks together outside of the public peering points. Here’s an example: your company is based in Atlanta and Mindspring is your ISP. A customer across town uses GTE as her ISP. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say that GTE and Mindspring don’t have a private peering relationship in Atlanta. What happens when you send a file to the customer? Your data has to travel to one of the public peering points (in this case, the closest one is probably MAE EAST in Virginia), and then go over GTE’s backbone to be delivered. If both ISPs had chosen to privately peer in Atlanta, your traffic would have gone directly across town. This means your connection did not have to go from Atlanta to Virginia and get stuck in a traffic jam at the MAE and then travel back to Atlanta.

The number of private peering arrangements and how they are setup can seriously affect the performance you will achieve when you attempt to do file transfers or any type of online activity using the Internet. The best Tier 1 ISPs are peered in a big way (large network connections using ATM switches), so the impact of the data going from one network to another is minimized. Others that aren’t peered may need to have your traffic travel over multiple backbone networks before it is delivered to it’s destination.

Keep in mind that the public peering points, although they are well designed and have been significantly upgraded recently can be choked with traffic at times. A great example of this is a major international event (like a Super Bowl, weather or political event- millions of people attempt to access web sites to get information about the event.) At times like this, power of private peering really comes into play. Private peering allows your file transfer or collaboration session to bypass the bottlenecks that are inherent in the public peering sites.

Access

Access is how your company is connected to the Internet. Usually when people tell you “I’ve got a T-1 to the Internet”, they are referring to the “access” portion of the connection.

There are two important components to access. First, is the part between you and the ISP’s POP (Point of Presence.) This part of the connection is done today using four major technologies: Analog Modems, ISDN, T1s and DSL. Second, and perhaps more importantly, is how that POP is connected to the Internet backbone.

A Tier 1 ISP will have many POPs all over the country. Typically, they’ll have at least the 50 major telecom markets, and most will have considerably more. Without doing a lot of research and scouring the web for data, you can pretty much assume that if you are dealing with a Tier 1 provider, and you live in a town whose name is immediately recognizable to people who don’t live there, you are going to have a POP within a reasonable distance from your facility. This is extremely important, because the lines that connect you to the ISP POP are “distance sensitive”, meaning that the further away you are, the more you will pay. This is true of both T1 service and ISDN. If you are too far away from the POP with DSL, you may not be able to obtain that service at all.

“Backhauling” is a term used to describe what can potentially happen when your office is in a less populated, more remote area. Since there isn’t a POP in your town, the ISP contracts with the telephone company in your area (who may then work with a variety of other telcos) to engineer a longer circuit to reach the POP. This is fine as long as it is done properly, but remember it adds cost and can present maintenance headaches down the road. The connection is more complicated than if the POP were local to you, and therefore can cause the telcos and ISP to have to do more work if there is ever a problem with the connection.

If you are using ISDN for access and your internet POP is in your town, the difference will mean that the call you make to the POP will be local vs. long distance. Local per minute rates for ISDN range from free to about $.02/channel minute. Long distance rates hover in the $.24/channel minute neighborhood. This is a big difference, so you’ll more than likely need to make sure you are making a local call to that POP.

The key concept here is that both the access and the backbone are important. Think of it this way, if you on a 4 lane on-ramp to a two lane highway, you’re not going to get where you’re going as fast as you might think.

The “Health Club Model”

With few exceptions, ISPs today are considerably oversubscribed. This means that they sell more actual bandwidth than they own on their network. This problem is worse with the Tier 3 and lower providers than it is for the Tier 2 and above, as the larger companies have built out more capacity than they will need for a short time, with built-in scalability to expand the network as their installed base grows.

This oversubscription is referred to as the “Health Club Model.” The concept is simple: a healthclub has room for 150 people; they sell memberships to 1000. When a majority of members show up to work out at the same time, no one will be happy. The owner of the gym is counting on the fact that not everyone will want to work out at the same time, and that a percentage of the customers will pay their memberships and never visit. This is a plan that has proven to work to various degrees of success in that business.

The same is true for Internet access, only it typically doesn’t work quite as well as the health club model (especially for the graphic arts industry customer who needs high bandwidth and premium service.) The Internet scenario is as follows: I’m a local ISP and I’ve got a full T-1 to a Tier 1 provider’s incredibly robust backbone. I’m service oriented, and I’ve got blazingly fast performance across my T-1 to the backbone. I also have 2,000 local dial-up modem customers, 20 128K ISDN corporate accounts and 4 T-1 customers who I’m providing service to using that connection. Most of the time, my ISDN corporate customers are going to get excellent service. Those 4 T-1 customers are almost always going to get great performance, that is, except when all the modems are dialed-up, the 20 corporates are fully utilizing their capacity and the other three T-1 customers are watching streaming videos at Broadcast.com. Its easy to understand why this wouldn’t be the optimal access for a company that planned on using it’s Internet connection for large files transfers.

With the advent of DSL, this problem is multiplied because DSL access provides the equivalent of a 6 lane highway as an on-ramp. This doesn’t do the user any good if the connection upstream to the backbone is oversubscribed.

Another key trend in access is for ISPs to use “packet shaping” devices to control what kind of traffic goes over their networks. These devices typically prioritize types of traffic so that the ISP can provide a perception to their clients of excellent performance. The key here is that most ISPs expect their customers to be primarily surfing the web and sending email. For most companies, this is true and actually makes the ISP customer happy in most circumstances. For a company in the graphic communications industry expecting high-performance, large file transfers, it can be a rude awakening to discover that file transfer (i.e., FTP) performance is being sacrificed to benefit the web surfer. Again, you’ve got to ask the right questions to get the service you need.

Going International

Canada is experiencing a build-out of bandwidth that is similar to that occurring in the US, albeit on a slightly smaller scale. All the major Tier 1 ISPs have a presence in Canada, and there are many regional and local ISPs offering DSL, Cable Modems and even a variety of different broadband wireless services. Again, the backbone and access issues are the key to choosing an ISP in Canada, as well as the connections that are provided to the US. Consider how much of your file transfers are going to be coming from the US, and how the ISP is connected to the large Internet backbones when making your decisions.

Bandwidth in Europe and Asia today is a scarce commodity. European ISPs are undergoing consolidation in the same way the US ISPs have over the last couple of years. This means that eventually they will have the same levels of service that are available in the US. At the present time, there are only a few companies that have truly robust, trans-atlantic Internet networks, and again, that could be very important for your file transfer applications, if you are receiving US files in Europe. Additionally, regulator issues vary in the European countries and access can be very expensive. DAX is currently working with multi-national companies delivering production files to Europe over the Internet, so we’ve investigated a lot of the challenges and opportunities you might face in attempting to obtain robust connectivity. For more information on connecting to Europe using the Internet, feel free to call me directly.

Asia represents a significant challenge, as well. While there are US ISPs who have trans-pacific links of significant size, the services in the actual countries vary greatly. For instance, in places like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Maylasia, there are excellent providers. However, in mainland China, Vietnam and other countries, it is both difficult to get access and the regulator and government restrictions can delay or prevent any sort of access if you don’t work with the right partners. Again, for more information contact DAX directly.

Service and Support

One of the most important items you should have on your checklist for choosing an ISP is the level of service and support that your prospective ISP will provide to you. A 24 hours per day, 7 days per week help desk should be the baseline.

Especially important to a company in the graphic communications market is to work with an Internet Service Provider that knows both the industry and the Macintosh. We’ve found that the level of support for the Mac provided by most ISPs today is extremely limited. Most of DAX’s clients are using the Mac as their primary workstation, we know how to solve Mac connectivity issues and file transfer problems. Additionally, our customers want to use their existing servers and Digital Asset Management systems to receive files and interact with their customers online—this is going to require some knowledge both of the equipment and software, operating systems, network topologies and workflow.

How many ISPs do you know that can tell you the difference between a TIFF/IT workflow and a Postscript workflow? We think there is a significant value in working with a company that is involved in the applications you’ll be using over the Internet. If you work with a company that has more residential than commercial customers, their service apparatus is not going to be set-up to support mission critical applications for the graphic communications industry company. Even companies that are business oriented may not have the level of competence you will need to leverage this important tool for your business.

In Summary

The Internet has emerged as a viable transmission vehicle for large production file transfers. To make this happen for your company, ask the right questions and know what kind of service level to expect for the money you will spend. DAX has assembled a team of experts in these applications, and we stand ready to help you make this important decision for your company.

For further information or assistance in planning you company’s data and telecommunications strategy, please contact DAX at info@dax-it.com or by calling (800) 329-6266.

(c) 1999 Digital Art Exchange, Inc. All rights reserved.