Belgian Inventive Designers joins IBM Color Consortium
Together with world leaders the company develops standard for color management
Antwerp, March 8 2006 – The Belgian company Inventive Designers has become a member of IBM’s international AFP Color Consortium. That is a global workgroup of top businesses from the output industry with a focus on reliability, quality and consistency in high volume color printing. One of the goals is the development of an open standard for color management in AFP printing. Inventive Designers, a company that builds software solutions for personalized communications, is the only Belgian member of the consortium.
Guy Dehond, CEO of Inventive Designers: “Being a software company we want to play an active role in the development of the market. The development and improvement of standards and a quality commitment are critical elements thereof. Our participation to this international consortium is cemented on our daily experiences with customers – both national as international. We are delighted that we get the chance to design the future of color in document output together with other top companies from the industry. Such a pioneer role perfectly fits our image as an innovative software company. ”
The AFP Color Consortium was founded in 2004 by IBM and today counts about twenty authoritative organizations among which IBM, Océ, Xerox and Group 1. They jointly define, develop and promote an architecture allowing to transmit and print color in a precise and uniform way via all possible AFP systems. The intention is to extend the AFP standard and at the same time to guarantee the interoperability between all elements of the workflow.
Advanced Function Printing (AFP) includes IBM’s printer software and hardware facilitating control and reproduction of documents and information regardless of the devices used. AFP is mainly used in large businesses with print departments and sophisticated high-volume printers.
“The use of color in communication is increasingly getting cheaper. Consequently more and more companies are using color in their customer communications,” explains Nick Hofstede, Business Executive of Inventive Designers for the AFP Color Consortium. “Color support is hence becoming more important but the market lacks uniform standards. If today a company with international braches for instance wants its logo printed in exact the same color on a printer in the US branch as on a printer in the European branch, problems are guaranteed. It is therefore necessary to establish a new color standard in order to avoid such issues.”
After the publication of the first specifications, the participating companies will continue to develop the standard in function of new market needs.
More information about the AFP Color Consortium: http://www.afpcolor.org/
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About Inventive Designers (http://www.inventivedesigners.com)
Inventive Designers builds software solutions enabling companies to communicate with their customers in a personal way through different channels, including Internet, print, e-mail, fax, and more. These solutions are based on open standards and platform independent, allowing for easy integration into any IT environment.
Inventive Designers, founded in 1994, is active on 6 continents in over 30 countries and 34 US states. The company has its headquarters in Antwerp, Belgium. Some 650 customers – representing more than 55000 end-users, are supported locally via a worldwide network of partners. Inventive Designers’ customers include Bellsouth (US), Dexia (B), Porsche (D), Total (FR), Winterthur (B), Securitas (B), US Postal (US), Nike (Europe), Suncorp (AUS) en Siemens (D), Staples (B).
Inventive Designers is an active member of AIIM, XPlor International, the AFP Color Consortium and takes part in different XML taskforces within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international organization that develops and sets the open standards. The company has won several national and international awards, including an ‘Honorable Mention’ award at XPlor’s ‘Innovator of the Year’ (2006), the 2005 Platinum European Seal of Excellence at CeBIT, the Trends Business Gazelle (2003 and 2005), ‘Best Performer’ at ‘Lion of the Export’ (2003), Springbok 2003 and the IBM ‘All Star Developer’ award. Inventive Designers has established long term relationships with the IBM Developer Labs in Rochester, Minnesota (US).
Inventive Designers, Joke Dehond, Marketing, T: +32 38 21 01 70, E: joke_dehond@inventivedesigners.com
Press contact
Newsengine PR, Kim Heylen, T: +32 32 60 96 42, E: kim.heylen@newsenginepr.com