HVTO Q&A:

Kumar Vora

VP, Enterprise Product Strategy and Marketing
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe talks with OutputLinks about its long history in the output industry, successes in high volume transaction output, and its LiveCycle Production Print ES.

Question:
What is the name of Adobe’s recently launched document generation solution?

Answer:
We recently launched LiveCycle Production Print ES.  ES stands for Enterprise Suite.  Production Print ES is a critical solutions component in the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite.

Question:

A lot of people don’t know that Adobe has a long history in the output industry.  Can you tell us a bit more about the evolution of your product offerings? 

Answer:

Adobe has a long history of delivering products and technologies that impact the output industry. Our first product, PostScript, was introduced 25 years ago this week. Products like Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and our font library have certainly played a foundational role in this marketplace as well. A bit less well known is the enterprise side of our business. In April of 2002, we acquired the JetForm/Accelio, and with that, the very successful Central Output Server family of products that were first introduced to the marketplace in the 1990's. We have over 1100 customers who are actively using that product line today.

In June of 2004, we introduced our first LiveCycle family products. This was a complete rebuild of the underlying platform, combining the core e-forms technology from JetForms, with a much more flexible and enterprise-flexible Java-based environment running on J2EE applications servers and delivering best-of-breed SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) capabilities. Subsequent acquisitions of business process management, document security, and enterprise repository technologies have enabled us to expand the product line and gain recognition as an industry leader in e-forms and secure document-based business process management.

New to the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite product line are LiveCycle Output ES and LiveCycle Production Print ES, completing our vision for offering a document automation suite that spans the full range of output requirements, including interactive, on-demand, and high-volume structured communications.

LiveCycle Output ES is targeted for on-demand business applications. LiveCycle Production Print ES delivers the high-volume, structured communications. Production Print ES is the one product in our line that breaks with the J2EE architecture mold for the sake of high performance. It combines our award-winning LiveCycle Designer software environment with high-speed document composition software from our partner StreamServe Inc.

Question:

Please walk through Production Print ES’ features and benefits with us. 

Answer:
LiveCycle Production Print ES is supported by the award-winning LiveCycle Designer ES which provides intuitive graphical design capabilities that make it easy to create and deploy templates without deep technical knowledge. To ease development efforts in complex enterprise operations, LiveCycle Designer ES allows development teams to work collaboratively, using intuitive tools to create and preview templates, bind XML or ASCII data to back-end systems, and lay out templates that dynamically adjust when merged with data. This helps ensure that documents accommodate the merged data content and volume by including or excluding design elements, growing to create space for data, and paginating automatically. LiveCycle Designer ES also simplifies the creation and maintenance of large collections of templates or template fragments, storing them until they are ready to be packaged and delivered for production. Fragments are reusable components such as a logo or address blocks used on multiple templates.

Additionally, LiveCycle Production Print ES includes a high-performance document composition engine that easily extends across multiple servers to help ensure high availability and enterprise scalability. Because of its unique architecture, LiveCycle Production Print ES lets you deliver complex jobs involving multiple output types simultaneously — without reprocessing jobs. For example, a bank statement can be rendered in AFP format for high-speed printing and simultaneously rendered as a PDF/A file for archiving. Commonly used form letters can be generated once and attached to other jobs during runtime.

Furthermore, LiveCycle Production Print ES allows you to perform jobs synchronously or asynchronously, providing high-speed processing for simple jobs or using its post-processing repository to collect multiple jobs over time and then group them for the most cost-effective and efficient delivery. Using the post-processing repository, you can maximize your throughput of both simple and complex jobs, shortening delivery time and reducing print delivery costs dramatically.

Also, LiveCycle Production Print ES provides numerous options for the finishing phase. Based on the criteria you select for sorting and grouping documents in the post-processing repository, you can automate the printing of special marks that communicate finishing information to operators and mailroom machines such as folders, inserters, and envelopers. Such marks include OMR codes that specify rules for enveloping, barcodes for identifying mail pieces, and text labels to provide instructions for manual handling. For example, all documents not exceeding four pages are sent to one machine, and documents up to ten pages are sent to a different machine that can handle larger envelope sizes, while everything else is processed manually. You can also manage the logic for including preprinted inserts, such as leaflets or advertising brochures, in a mailing. In order to optimize postage, a decision on whether or not to include an insert can be based on the final weight of the mail piece.

Finally, LiveCycle Production Print ES is part of a complete LiveCycle ES business solution, making it easy to integrate with other solution components.

Question:

How is it different from competing products? 

Answer:

There are several key areas where LiveCycle Production Print is significantly different from most of its competitors. The first is the post-processing functionality which delivers immediate benefits for data center managers who are trying to optimize existing operations. The second is the fact that Adobe provides a delivered in conjunction with the rest of the LiveCycle ES family, providing a single environment that spans interactive, on-demand, and high volume document processes.  Finally, Production Print ES is supported by an award-winning and proven design environment in LiveCycle Designer.

Question:
Tell us about the greatest successes of your company in the HVTO industry.

Answer:

LiveCycle Production Print ES is brand new to Adobe, but Adobe is no stranger to high volume implementations, and neither is StreamServe, the company we're partnering with to deliver Production Print. The Central Output Server family line has been used over the years to deliver millions of documents per year for a number of our customers, with solutions for both high volume statements, as well as branch printing.  Our customers include: HSBC, State Farm, CNA, Lloyds Bank, Credit Lyonnais, Wachovia, Chevy Chase, Fifth Third Group, Department of Veteran's Affairs, and the Vanguard Group. To give you an example, a leading bank in Spain, Caixa d'Estalvis de Terrassa, uses Central Output Server products to handle very high volumes of correspondence and are saving over 1.25 million Euros annually in the process. This bank generates approximately 60,000 documents a day, reaching 100,000 to 250,000 a day with end-of-month high traffic. Similarly, our partner StreamServe has extensive experience in HVTO. Here are a few example of their customers and customer volumes: Uni2 (service provide) -250 million pages per year; Deutsche Rentenversicherung (Public pension provider in Germany) - 250 million pages per year. BMW Finance - 40 million pages per year.

Question:
What brought about the need for this product? Why was this product created?

Answer:
By customer request, actually. Customers have longed for a single platform for all business documents.  LiveCycle is a best-of-breed solution for interactive and on-demand processes. Output customers wanted a single solution, not a separate solution for traditional document output.

Question:
What value does this product bring to the industry?

Answer:
Production Print ES provides best-of-breed electronic document processing - spanning e-forms, BPM, document security - inside and outside the firewall, combined with best-of-breed high volume print solutions.  Whereas competitors are still focused on discrete document generation processes (e.g. correspondence), Adobe is looking to solve a larger problem: an engagement gap.

Question:
What niche of the market does this product fit?

Answer:
We don't think of LiveCycle as a niche toolset. Rather, as an enterprise platform for business communications - with a standards-based toolset.  We are focused on 4 vertical markets: Financial Services, Government, Manufacturing, and Life Sciences. For example, in financial services, key applications include: correspondence management, account opening/welcome kit generation, personalized statements.

Question:
What about the anticipated success of Production Print ES? Have you received favorable response from customers?

Answer:
We're very excited about the prospects for Production Print ES, and have already gotten enormously positive response from our customers, especially in financial services, insurance, government, manufacturing, and life sciences. We're seeing keen interest particularly in two key application areas, correspondence management, and account opening....although account opening is more accurately called citizen or business self-service in the government sector. For instance, we're involved with a number of customers who are re-tooling their correspondence management systems right now. They're consolidating multiple systems from different departments or merger activities, or trying to rein in the ad-hoc correspondence that is being generated outside the system with Microsoft Word. They're looking for a much more intuitive and self-guided experience for their employees. They're looking to "go green" where they can and provide secure electronic files instead of paper where possible. At the same time, they need to make sure that whatever they do will work seamlessly with their high-volume production printing requirements as well. 

2008 will be a tremendously huge year for Production Print ES.