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