When physical meets digital to innovate, inspire and engage
Dr Udo Neisel Global Presales and Solutions Delivery Manager, Pitney Bowes, looks at innovations in the printing world. Innovation will be the theme for this year in the printiverse. Hunkeler Innovation Days, taking place in February in Lucerne, provides a global stage for the industry to showcase its technologies in print production and finishing. Evident throughout the show will be the huge impact of digital on the industry, and its continued transformation of physical print technology to drive productivity and customer engagement.
At Pitney Bowes, we talk of the integration of physical and digital, and the powerful outcomes that result from their convergence: achieving higher-value communications, enabling omnichannel capabilities, driving industry-leading compliance and reaching operational excellence. Hunkeler will see some great examples of this, as we proudly showcase some of our most popular technologies which integrate physical and digital: the IntelliJet 20® HD Printing System, for example, which combines proven HP inkjet technology and Pitney Bowes Production Intelligence® software; and ClarityTM, which integrates the power of the Industrial Internet by using sensors to collect, integrate and organise deep performance analytics from high-speed mailing inserters.
Print technologies in our data-driven age are engineered to drive productivity and enable operational excellence. They combine physical power with advanced digital platforms for high-impact, high performance results. And they help organisations to succeed: in winning business, in gaining a competitive advantage, and in driving engagement. Just as broadband speeds get faster almost without us realising, and universal wi-fi becomes an expectation, print technologies have become more refined and more powerful than ever managing high volumes with lightning-fast speed and absolute precision.
In IT, Moore’s law is the cornerstone of development. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, realised that the number of transistors per square inch had doubled every year since their invention. In 1965 he predicted that this trend would continue into the future. From the USB to the smartphone and MP3 player, hardware now has more capacity than imaginable, on far smaller devices. Bearing in mind we have generated more data in the past few years than in the history of humankind – and need somewhere to store it – this is pretty remarkable.
Now, Moore’s law is appropriate to the print industry, as high-performance systems are right-sized and integrated into more compact, cost-effective technologies without compromising speed, quality or capacity. Here, InfoTrends identified the Zone of Disruption, in which technologies have “an acquisition price less than $1 million, high levels of productivity, and a running cost model below that of toner-based products”. They write that “Continuous-feed inkjet products with web widths of 20 inches or wider had remarkable success in the past few years but not all users are able to afford a million-dollar plus price tag, particularly if they need to build in a second unit as back-up or disaster recovery as part of their capabilities. Getting underneath a million dollar capital acquisition level opens up new opportunities for these users”.
With research finding that consumers take just five seconds to decide if a marketing communication is relevant to them1, print technology buyers are looking for ways to create instant impact: high-speed inkjet to produce razor-sharp definition and high-impact colour, for example. At Hunkeler, they will be looking out for futureproof technologies which have the potential to help them meet their firms’ and their clients’ targets for achieving both impact, growth and compliance; which combine smart product design with vast capacity; and which boost their print power and performance whilst integrating intelligent features, embedded in a user-friendly interface.
At 2017’s show, Innovationdays is more aptly-named than ever.
Pitney Bowes will be at Hunkeler Innovationdays, Messe Luzern, exhibition Allmend Lucerne, Hall 1 and 2 in Lucerne, Switzerland from Monday, Feb 20, 2017 – Thursday, Feb 23, 2017. Marc Hirtz and Manor George from Pitney Bowes will present at the DOXNET on-site event on Tuesday February 21st, 2017 from 1pm. Their session will focus on the power of connecting physical and digital communications with a focus on high volume print and mail and personalised video. Register online at: www.doxnet.eu
1 Pitney Bowes research, ‘The Future of Communications’
