Another Successful Inkjet Summit

The third annual Inkjet Summit wrapped up on Wednesday night with an elegant awards dinner, a fitting celebration of another successful conference. The 100 printers in attendance spent three days at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, getting an in-depth education about production inkjet printing. Current users of the technology shared their experiences with those still investigating it, and attendees networked constantly during the three-day event.

More than a dozen in-plant managers attended the event this year, and each gained a wealth of knowledge about how production inkjet presses are replacing both offset and toner devices. One user panel discussion featured the in-plant manager from Urban Lending Solutions, who started an in-plant for the company with two Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 GP inkjet presses. Among the other in-plants present were those from Yale University, Briggs & Stratton, Penn State University, OGE Energy, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana, Transamerica, Life & Protection, Washington State University, Fidelity Investments, the LDS Church and the University of Texas at Austin.

Conference Chair Marco Boer began the event off on a positive note when he declared in his keynote presentation: "There's probably no better market to be in than this production inkjet market." He noted that 164 billion pages were printed on inkjet presses in 2014, and that number will only grow.

One integral driver of inkjet success, noted several speakers, is getting customer buy-in and working with customers to create new inkjet products they may not even have thought about.

"Your customers are reinventing and looking for different ways to do business," noted keynote speaker Barb Pellow, of InfoTrends. Printers should also reinvent themselves using inkjet and use this new capability help customers differentiate themselves using innovative new products.

Watch for a full report on the Inkjet Summit in the June issue of IPG.