Tony Nouwen, Expert in production, workflow and print process, Concentra, Belgium and Walter Maldeghem, Agfa Graphics

1. Prepress Production
in the cloud
Tony Nouwen

2. • Who am i
• What is Concentra
• Our Partnership in print
• The Virtual Printcenter
• Challenges
• Configuration
• What changed
• Customer usability
• Why Agfa
• Performance
Agenda

3. Intro – who am I
Tony Nouwen
• I live in Hasselt, Belgium.
• 8 years in small printhouses
• 21 years experience within Concentra. Print, workflow
and IT-systems related projects
What is Concentra
• Privately owned by family Baert (130y)
• Regional Media Company
• Turnover: 250m€
• Employees: 1000
• 8 locations, including NL (weekly free newspapers)

5. Our partnership in print
Concentra & Corelio
Coldset Printing Partners [CPP]
• CPP is join-venture of coldset printing activities of 2 major Belgian media groups
• CPP prints own in-house publications as well as external international products
like The Wallstreet Journal Europe, Daily Express, Daily Star, Zaman,...
• 15 mio copies/week
• 10 CTP units - 450k sqm/year - 1.8 mio plates/year
• 11 presses

6. Coldset Printing Partners
& Agfa Graphics
Virtual Print Center
Private cloud hosting & managed services
for prepress production
A New Approach
Agfa Graphics moves prepress workflow from the print site into the Cloud

7. The Challenges
A number of key requirements
1. Optimize, automate and improve efficiency
2. Reduce cost, driven by economies of scale
3. Uniformity & standardization
4. Print quality improvement
5. Operational excellence and latitude
6. Single Central control center
7. Best service towards customers
8. Cost of ownership >>> cost of operation

8. What was Agfa Graphics able to offer?
proposed a solution:
– Hosting Agfa IT infrastructure / datacenters secure & managed services
provided by Agfa ICS
– Running :Arkitex software & services by Agfa Graphics
– Offered as a webservice
In fact, a new term “Prepress as a Service” (PaaS)

9. The Cloud Configuration

10. The Cloud Configuration

11. What changed with the cloud?
• One central control center
• Better control and overview for operators
• Faster, less errors and more reliable
• Improved flexibitlity
• Better customer communication
• Cost are reduced and efficiency is improved

12. Case:
Anonymous customer
about Portal Usability
User statement about uploading pages
“Uploading a page in portal is as easy as posting something to
Facebook. I can do that, it’s build for me!”

13. Why partner with Agfa?
• Internal IT services can be expensive & usually lack “application”
knowledge
• General cloud services providers only offers infrastructure and
lacks “prepress” services and knowledge
• Only Agfa could provide a PaaS solution
• Agfa has been a reliable Newspaper solution partner to both
Corelio and Concentra for many years

14. Cloud performance
• A couple of figures
– We print circa 15 mio copies per week
Upload / Peak
[PDF’s]
Download / peak
[Tiff’s]
Number of files 2.000/day
500/hour
7.500/day
2000/hour
Datavolumes 9 GB/day
1,5 GB/hour
24 GB/day
6 GB/hour
Telco 10-60 Mbps
Public internet [secured]
100 Mbps
MPLS fibre optic

15. Thank you
tnouwen@concentra.be