Kodak is now offering its Prinergy prepress workflow as a managed software option, hosted by Kodak, with the release of the new Prinergy VME, or Virtual Machine Environment.
Kodak will use Microsoft Azure to host the system, taking responsibility for system administration, 24-hour security and monitoring, upgrades and problem resolution. This includes data backups, which can be distributed across several data centres for peace of mind.
The obvious advantage is that this allows printers to cut back on the cost of investing and maintaining in their IT infrastructure. The downside of course is that they lose control over their IT assets. Nonetheless, a well-resourced system such as Azure will probably offer a high degree of robustness than most printers can realistically maintain though naturally Kodak has not included any details of the cost of this approach.
However, Kodak has tested the system in North America and says there are several customers using it for live production. In addition, Wilco Printing & Binding, based in the Netherlands, has just become the first European customer. William Schuring, Wilco’s COO, commented: “Working in the cloud is the future. When it was time to replace our existing server infrastructure, Kodak proposed we switch to Prinergy VME with Managed Services. We have an excellent, long standing partnership with Kodak and utilizing Prinergy VME with Managed Services gives us unprecedented data security and a much better ROI compared to an on premises server environment.”
Kodak already operates Prinergy Cloud, which includes various analytics services so this sounds like an obvious next step. And given that there are a growing number of cloud-based analytics, and even MIS, it seems inevitable that more printers will look to run workflow software as a service. You can find further details from kodak.com.
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