PrintingIQ’s Champions of Print series profiles the knowledge leaders in the print industry, those individuals who continually work to push software, hardware, standards and the industry in general to the next level. The first installment in the series features Rich Howarth, director of strategy at IBM Printing Systems .

Howarth took some time recently to discuss the current state of the printing market, the importance of standards such as PPML and JDF, and how he sees savvy printing companies positioning themselves for the future.

PrintingIQ: Can you give us some background on IBM Printing Systems?

Rich Howarth: Historically, IBM has focused on high-end production printing solutions for data centers and commercial printers and service bureaus, as well as industrial solutions. Over the last six or seven years, we’ve also entered the office environment with a range of workgroup printers and multifunction products, so we have a very broad product line top to bottom, monochrome and color.

Our focus in terms of adding value and helping customers tends to be on the software and integration side, as well as on the hardware side. We are viewed as the leader in terms of building production, workflow management solutions for high-end digital printing. We have a wide range of printing software solutions that fit in to each of the environments we address, the industrial environment, the office environment and the production environment. And we continue to add value and help customers improve their productivity, reduce their labor requirements and fundamentally lower their costs of producing documents in each of those segments through our software and integration services.

Our solutions really help customers capture all of their electronic data, store it, print it when necessary, and distribute it electronically where that makes sense, for example, in business-to-business scenarios, things like giving customers access to bills and statements online.

PrintingIQ: I understand that you are on the board of directors at PODI. Could you explain what PODI is and does and why it’s important to the print industry?

RH: PODI comprises more than 100 companies now, including the major printer manufacturers. The board of directors is IBM, Xerox, EFI, Adobe, NexPress, Pitney Bowes and HP. Most of the other printing companies, including Oce, Canon and Ricoh, are advisory board members, and most of the software vendors, from Exstream to Document Sciences, are members also.

What we’re trying to do with PODI is create an industry standard for variable one-to-one publishing. In the past, each vendor has had their own proprietary solution for doing variable data color printing. Variable data color printing is very CPU-intensive and has been difficult to do. It’s not just creating a PostScript data stream. If you really want to go and create 1,000 marketing brochures customized for 1,000 different customers, that’s a very difficult thing to do with standard PostScript and it won’t print very efficiently. So you either need to use a vendor-proprietary approach or something like what we’re creating at PODI in PPML.

PPML (for Personalized Print Markup Language) is an industry standard that allow you to perform such customization across multiple applications and hardware vendor systems, and that’s obviously preferable to the proprietary approach.

PrintingIQ: Where does the JDF standard come into play here?

RH: PPML is a data stream for describing variable data, whereas JDF works with any data stream, be it PostScript, PDF, AFP, PPML or meta code. JDF describes a whole set of attributes and parameters to allow components of a digital printing or publishing solution to interoperate with one another. So it would allow prepress software to interoperate with a print server to interoperate with a press. The idea is that all of the various pieces in a digital print or press environment, eventually, hopefully, will be able to interoperate through JDF.

One of the things in JDF is an industry-standard job ticket. It sounds like a simple thing, but a job ticket contains all of the attributes that describe how you want a job printed -- how you want it imposed, for example, what kind of paper you want it printed on and what size. All of those things are typically described in vendor-specific ways today. The JDF job ticket, which IBM has been very proactive in driving with JDF, will standardize the way you describe the document.

PrintingIQ: Where do you see the print industry evolving, especially as electronic forms of communications come increasingly into the fore?

RH: The printing industry has evolved substantially over the last five to seven years. There was a lot of growth, change and turmoil, as we all know. And it’s been driven by a number of factors. Certainly, the economy has been a major contributor. But there is still page growth. IBM estimates that more than 3 trillion pages were printed in 2003 digitally. That market is still a good market and will continue to grow, but I think it will be somewhat different than in the past.

For example, it will be more focused on using print where it makes sense, as opposed to being the only technology for some things. What we see happening is that most companies will have multiple channels for delivering information. There will be a right channel, and a secondary channel, and maybe even a tertiary channel. Print will no longer be the only – or best -- channel.

A good example is stock charts in the back of a newspaper. Twenty years ago, that was the only way to deliver that information. Well now, they may still print them in a newspaper, it doesn’t cost a lot, but it’s a really poor delivery mechanism. People can get a stock quote on their cell phone now, up to the minute. So that’s an example of something for which paper is not particularly well-suited.

There are other things, like general newspapers and magazines, that we believe will always remain printed as well as being available over the Web. For example, you can read a printed copy of the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times far faster than you can read it online. And if you’re sitting and waiting for your airplane, or taking off, you can read a magazine or a newspaper. You can’t read an electronic document in the same way. So that’s an example of something I think will be offered in multiple mediums forever probably.

PrintingIQ: Where do you see direct mail vs. e-mail marketing heading? Isn’t this an area where printing companies are getting squeezed out?

RH: Actually, we see a lot of customers expressing resistance to e-mail marketing, and part of it is as a result of the spam that we see out there today. But there is a much smaller number of consumers who are resistant to getting unsolicited direct mail pieces. If someone is going to send you something in the mail, you tend to take them more seriously because you know that costs them a couple of dollars, vs. e-mail, which you know is free and they’re just broadcasting it out to millions of people at a time.

There is possible legislation that could occur to make it more difficult to mass-market via e-mail. And there are changes occurring in a lot of the browsers in online systems so that you’re not going to even be able to receive an e-mail message with embedded images unless the sender is in your address book, for example. The latest version of AOL is doing that now.

So a lot of companies are asking us how to continue marketing to consumers to maintain and enhance the relationship and cross-sell services that customers might be interested in. For a while, people were becoming more negative on printed direct mail and direct marketing campaigns, but now there is a lot more interest building. And we see that as a key future market for the digital printing industry.

PrintingIQ: And that’s where things like PPML become more important?

RH: Well, the more you can personalize the communications, the more effective they are and the more likely you’ll get a response from who you’re sending it to. You cannot do that on an offset press.

This isn’t a new idea. It’s been out there since the mid-‘90s, when all of the digital presses started appearing. But it’s a lot more practical now, since companies have invested a lot more in customer relationship management solutions and really keeping information on their customers. So we believe that will be an important growth area for the future.

PrintingIQ: So where does this leave today’s printing companies?

RH: For commercial printers and the printing industry in general, I think that just like the IT industry and other industries, it will continue to be a challenging business. It’s critical that you are able to add value to your customer’s business – either through lower cost, shorter turnaround time, providing more service, something like that. It will be critical to differentiate yourself in order to avoid getting commoditized.

Again, variable data, last minute changes, customization and personalization are all ways commercial printers and service bureaus can become closer to their customers and differentiate themselves.

PrintingIQ: Isn’t that a big challenge for a lot of printers today?

RH: For a lot of printers, it’s a tremendous challenge. It’s much more than producing a product. Many commercial printers have had a tendency to try to standardize on things, focusing on reducing the amount of prepress and upfront work associated with a job, and being able to get it on a press and out as quickly as possible to improve profitability.

That kind of process becomes a commodity fairly quickly. Everyone does the same thing, so everyone can shop around a job and find the lowest cost.

But if you can add something beyond that, customization or being able to respond at the last minute because you have an EDI link to your customer’s systems or something like that, that gives your customer a reason to continue doing business with you.

This requires more IT capabilities in commercial printers. The ones that are predominantly offset today, I think are faced with a difficult transition, whereas a lot of commercial printers that are on the leading edge with digital technology and document management solutions are positioned very well to go after this new market.