Enfocus is one our favorite companies in the printing industry – inventing great software products, that enable printers to be more effective and more productive. At GraphExpo we had the opportunity (once again) to talk to Vice President Fabian Prudhomme. Automation is still key for Enfocus and with the Switch App Store introduced at Drupa, both Enfocus and third-party vendors will be able to add functionality to Switch and the customer’s workflow. A new feature soon available is PDF proofing – really cool, but see for yourself.

0:07    Enfocus is a software company specializing in the development of tools to control the quality of PDF files for print and to automate workflow processes in the graphic arts industry.

0:16    Your keyword from last year was automation. What is the keyword for this year?

0:19    It’s still automation. As far as we’re concerned, you know. You would think that the day would come where the printers, the publishers would be automated, would have automated pre- press workflows, and we still notice trade show after trade show that these prospects, those companies, those customers are coming to see us, and still huge gaps or missing automation, and you know, even preflighting. I’ve met printing company owners that are still preflighting manually, opening files, visually checking them, not even thinking about automating this step of the process. So, there’s still a lot for us to do in this market.

0:55    Are you surprised that this is still the situation?

0:59    I am, because they’re leaving money on the table, and I’m talking about companies that are successful, who have high printing volumes, a lot of customers, and yet you’re still doing so many things manually where they could automate it at cheap prices, increase their productivity, free up time to do other things, and it’s still not happening.

1:18    Why is it like that? Is it because they donít know?

1:22    I wouldnít say they don’t know, they’ve just not given it a thought. I think they’re very busy with all kinds of things. Theyíve thought about upgrading hardware, theyíve thought about reducing ink consumption, things like that. But, automation and commercial printing is still something that doesn’t happen naturally in the human brain for some reason. So, that’s what we’re here for ñ to change that, obviously.

1:41    Have you added any new products to your software portfolio since the last graph Expo?

1:45    Yes. Well obviously, at Drupa, we launched the appstore, which is embedded into Switch. So, as the name says, itís a store where customers can buy at apps which will function within their Switch workflow in the Switch environment. These apps are developed by us. They are developed by integration partners. They are developed by end customers who have done specific things with Switch, and have now a platform, a commercial platform where they can resell what they have done in the past, not only to one customer but to the entire world, basically. So, that’s one of the big features within Switch, turning Switch into a bigger ecosystem. Actually showing here at the booth, our PDF preview module. It’s a new product. Itís going to be sold as a Switch module we’re launching at the end of this year, and it’s going to be a solution that enables online PDF approval.

2:35    What is the advantage for the client to have an online PDF approval?

2:38    Basically, it’s the ease of working in a browser environment. You send a URL to someone that you want to use to approve a PDF file. This person just clicks on the URL, has a PDF rendered and streams in the browser. So, you donít have to download it locally. You don’t have to wait, so this technology makes it happen very fast. You can select objects in the PDF, make annotations, approve the file, reject the file. It’s actually making use of Cloud technology, which for us is the first step in an oncoming series of migrations towards the Cloud with the rest of our products.

3:18    This is the first time Graph Expo is in Orlando. Was it a good change for your company?

3:21    We came with lowered expectations, and so far, I can say that the traffic volume that we’ve seen in the booth, the number of leads, the sales opportunities, actually are a bit higher than last year in Chicago. So, for us, it’s been a good show.

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