IBM Printing Systems

When IPG wrote about Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Co. in May of 1994, its in-plant was in the midst of a major forms management initiative. The Columbia, S.C., shop was moving its forms printing from offset presses to a new Xerox DocuTech and had come up with a groundbreaking solution where forms were stored as PostScript files on a server and printed on demand. Upper management was excited about the new DocuTech. The in-plant was looking forward to reducing warehouse inventory. All signs pointed to a successful future for the in-plant. Then came some unexpected curve balls. First, Colonial Life was

SERVING A major utilities company like Portland General Electric (PGE) can be a challenge, to say the least. After all, PGE provides power to over 1.5 million people in Oregon, covering 52 cities in a 4,000-square-mile radius. Its in-plant, Print and Mail Services, handles virtually all of PGE’s printing in its 7,000-square-foot facility. This includes customer billing and notices, mapping books for the line crews, training manuals, engineering/architectural drawings, presentations, self-mailers and more. This amounted to 35 million pages and 12 million mail pieces in 2007. Despite this monumental workload, the 13-employee in-plant has not only impressed PGE with its proficiency, it

THIS YEAR’S AIIM/On Demand Conference & Expo certainly had some obstacles to overcome in its first year at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. With the Boston Marathon running on the show’s opening day, hotel rooms were at a premium. Then a storm assaulted the city, discouraging some from driving in. And as if that weren’t enough, the show had to compete with other industry events, such as the Association of College and University Printers conference, taking place at the same time in San Francisco, and the PrintFest trade show, which kicked off later that week in Long Beach, Calif. Despite all

IBM extended its printer industry leadership with the introduction of a new set of production printers at the Hunkeler Innovation Days trade show. The company unveiled a new full-color, variable-data continuous web printer, a new monochrome continuous form printer and two new cutsheet printers. These new products build on the momentum generated by the recent announcement by IBM and Ricoh regarding their joint venture, InfoPrint Solutions, based on IBM’s Printing Systems Division. IBM’s new Infoprint 5000, a full-color, variable-data continuous web system fills a gap between previously available industry color offerings of very high quality but lower speed and and those alternatives with lower

Long a leader in digital office solutions, Ricoh is making a move into the production printing environment. It has formed a joint venture company with IBM, based on IBM’s Printing Systems Division. Ricoh will own 51 percent of the joint venture, to be called the InfoPrint Solutions Co. “For Ricoh it signals the beginning of new stage in our strategy for global growth,” said Masamitsu Sakurai, Ricoh’s president and CEO, speaking in Japanese at a New York press conference. “We believe we can adopt our existing technology and production known-how to the production printing field.” Trends like variable data printing and print on demand prompted

Industry Consortium to Join in Unparalleled Collaboration Effort for Printing of Customer Communications BOULDER, CO—August 30, 2006—IBM announced that a key open standards initiative for the digital print industry has reached a major milestone. A majority of the AFP Color Consortium, a 28-company standards body, has approved IBM’s proposal to fully open the development of the Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) architecture. With this agreement, the members of the consortium will collaboratively develop all extensions to the AFP architecture, which is used by clients worldwide for the high speed printing of bills, statements and other customer communications. The consortium has already jointly published key