News Analysis: Esko and Artwork is a big story for its customers, but the whole printing industry benefits from Enfocus' bigger test bed—and should be good news for PDF users as Adobe feels some competitive heat.
Enfocus has come a long way since Peter Camps launched the company in the mid-1990s, writing a really useful Acrobat plug-in that helped pre-press pros clean up the messes that graphic designers left behind in their PDF files destined for the printing press. The plug-in, PitStop, provided the metaphorical electronic rubylith to make quick-and-dirty, last-minute changes.
Camps left the company several years ago and launched Gradual Software, having sold Enfocus to Artwork Systems, both from Belgium.
Before he left, he helped launch the Ghent Working Group, an Enfocus-neutral, printing-industry group that established standards for pre-press PDFs that still seeks and publishes best-practices information for printers and the people who feed PDFs into their presses.
Last week, Artwork and Esko-Graphics—yet another Belgian company—bought up Artwork Systems. While mergers and acquisitions are par for the course in this epoch of world financial history (and sometimes it seems that companies merge for the sake of merging), this one could be a good one for the PDF world. While Artwork had some hooks into the packaging industry, that's Esko's forte. And both Esko and Artwork offer some form of print PDF workflow system; Esko also manufactures flexographic plate makers.
That means that Enfocus will have to make its software work with more pre-press systems, testing it in-house against more hardware and software combinations than ever before. It's likely the next revs of its PitStop server software, Acrobat plug-in PitStop Pro, and standalone PDF editor, Neo with its deep prepress features, will be more battle-ready when they roll out to their user base that extends way beyond Esko and Artwork's customers.
Carsten Knudsen—current CEO of Esko-Graphics and who will become the CEO of the combined group—and Artwork Systems Group Chairman of the Board Guido Van der Schueren, will become the chief commercial officer of the new entity, figures that will go both ways: Keeping in touch with Enfocus users will keep Esko and Artwork on their toes.
"Enfocus provides the seeds of some of the most important, wider direction for the industry," the two executives said in a joint e-mail interview with PDFzone. "In addition, there are upstream customers of Enfocus' who represent a substantial and crucial segment of graphic arts. Staying in touch and providing for the needs of these customers ensures that we maintain a holistic view of the industry and its processes, from conception and design through highest-end production and output."
PDF's position among electronic document formats is pretty healthy, and for the pre-press world, it's pretty much the only game in town. This growing Belgian juggernaut only solidifies that position, extending it deeper into the label and packaging market. It also makes a strong third-party PDF software developer stronger. That ought to keep Adobe on its toes, as the half-cooperation, half-competition between the two heats up.
Interestingly, behind closed doors a lot of companies—especially those catering to a print crowd that bends and molds PDF to the extreme frontiers of the technology—people aren't taking Microsoft's fledgling XPS format very seriously. While the new Esko entity isn't planning to drop PDF support anytime soon in favor of XPS, it's not ruling out XPS as a viable future alternative. That will serve to remind Adobe that it can't rest on its laurels as more and more people upgrade to Windows Vista and get its XPS-export tools built into the operating system and consider its potential for print workflows.
"Another fortunate aspect of the joining of Artwork Systems and Esko is that we can devote even more resources to scouting and developing new technologies. Both of us have been studying XPS closely, and we will be ready to meet demand if the market requires it," Knudsen and Van der Schueren said. "Although we do feel that PDF has the muscle and staying power to maintain and even grow its position as the dominant pre-press file format, all technologies are fair game. In fact, in some cases we may not only watch and get ready to offer compatible solutions—we may even decide to drive advancement and subsequently, adoption, if a new technology genuinely has merit for our customers.
"Again, the important advantage we will have and therefore are able to offer our customers is the increased resources we have to make these assessments without compromising ongoing development projects. Our customers can rest assured that while we continue to improve and advance existing solutions, we are keeping our eyes on the horizon on their behalf—whether we invent the new technologies ourselves, or not."
