Executive Q&A: Jacob Aizikowitz, XMPie

In our continuing series, Printing News talked to Jacob Aizikowitz, founder and president of XMPie Inc. We’re asking executives from all segments of the industry to answer the same set of questions, with the goal of providing you, our readers, with a good overall picture of the industry as a whole.

PN: Tell me a little about your company, the segment of the market it serves, and what you consider to be your “core” users.

JA: XMPie is the leading provider of software for cross-media, variable data one-to-one communications. XMPie solutions help businesses create and manage highly effective cross-media campaigns, leveraging their valuable information about markets and customers to achieve dramatic returns on their marketing investments. The company is headquartered in the United States (New York) with an R&D center in Israel, and sales, support and professional services operations across the globe.

XMPie users range from print and marketing services providers—our “core” users—to enterprises, small and large. The modular architecture of our software allows customers to tailor an entry configuration that matches their initial goals in personalization, and later grow the configuration—in functionality or bandwidth—to match their evolving and growing needs.

PN: How did you get involved with the company? What is your background before that?

JA: I started XMPie in July 2000 with my co-founders Israel Roth and Reuven Sherwin. We knew personalization was integral to customer acquisition and retention, but we saw it being implemented via two media types—print and the Internet—without any linkage between the two. We saw the potential to bridge that gap by creating technology and workflows that bring together these two media channels, and provide marketing with a media-agnostic approach to personalization.

Prior to XMPie, I was senior corporate director, Systems Technologies at Scitex, where I headed R&D projects that resulted in highly innovative digital printing products. Prior to joining Scitex, I was with IBM Haifa Research Lab, leading its Application, Solutions and Services Group. I was also part of the founding team of Electronics for Imaging (EFI) where I served initially as director of R&D and later as vice president of Engineering. My academic background consists of an undergraduate degree from Technion—Israel’s Institute of Technology—and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

PN: What do you consider your greatest achievement to be?

JA: XMPie’s greatest achievement is the success of our users. I could run down a list of our technology patents or accolades, but in the end, we are in this business to empower our customers. At the most recent XMPie Users Group Conference I was incredibly impressed by the pioneering nature of our users and proud of their advancements in creating state-of-the-art personalized cross-media communications using our software. Their success is our success, and their ongoing pursuit of excellence keeps everyone at XMPie focused on providing the vision and tools to take our users to the next level.

An equally significant achievement for XMPie is our pioneering of the cross-media direction in our industry. When we started, the focus of the industry was all about print. We took an approach that emphasized highly creative variable data printing combined with integrated e-mail and Web. Today, most of the industry is on the path we charted early on, but we are still at the forefront with a solution architecture that brings together these vastly different media disciplines under one roof with one framework. In essence, our tag line “One-to-One-in-One” still truly describes our leadership and uniqueness.

PN: If there was anything you could change, either about your career in regards to the print industry, your company, or the market as a whole, what would it be and why?