Print and the Cloud

“CoZone stands for transparent project control and reliable handling, available to all participants at all times,” explained GMG marketing director Michael Farkas. “With CoZoneCollaborate, we launch the first chapter of our GMG web strategy.” CoZone Collaborate allows users to track the status of a project and efficiently manage production processes.

Mobile Print and One-to-One Marketing

Also rolled out at drupa, Circle from XMPie (a Xerox company) is an interactive, digital storyboard that makes 1:1 multichannel campaigns easy to visualize and understand bychief marketing officers (CMOs), providers, and customers. A cloud-based service designed to foster teamwork, XMPie Circle provides a visual language that enables all stakeholders to share concepts, agree on a blueprint, guide development, review and approve goals and touch points, and monitor analytics.

This software development follows on the heels of Xerox’s 2011 alliance with Cisco to simplify IT management by delivering cloud-based services and technology solutions that combine network intelligence and print. The partnerhip brings Xerox's market-leading managed print and cloud IT outsourcing (ITO) services to customers over Cisco’s intelligent network infrastructure. Both companies are arming their channel partners with solutions that help to extend existing IT investments to improve performance and reduce cost. Xerox and Cisco aim to make IT applications more accessible and improve efficiency for the workforce with solutions, such as mobile printing—the ability to print from any device, anytime, anywhere. More than eight percent of U.S. Internet traffic already comes from tablets or phones, according to Comscore, and that figure is growing fast.

“This relationship puts Xerox and Cisco at the center of a simplified, connected infrastructure—bringing together networking, printing and cloud services,” said Xerox CEO Ursula Burns. “Together we’re helping businesses transition to the cloud in ways that best suit their operations, and add the services needed to enhance security and productivity for employees.”

Of the new Circle software, XMPie president Jacob Aizikowitz, PhD, added: “1:1 multichannel campaigns … bring exceptionally good results, yet too often brands resort to either mass-media or single-media personalization efforts. Such a choice is almost exclusively due to the chasm that exists between the brands and their service providers around 1:1 cross-media. We believe that Circle goes a long way to bridging this chasm, enabling brands, service providers and professionals to collaborate effectively,” Aizikowitz, added. “Such collaboration will make choosing 1:1 multichannel campaigns a broadly accepted practice, leading to better marketing and overall growth in our industry.”

Whereas today’s 1:1 software solutions focus on the campaign touch points (e.g. postcard, email, website) and ignore the linkage between them, Circle makes it possible to weave together the various touch points into one coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end. Circle also allows for associating visual content with touch points, helping all the stakeholders to envision the intended campaign look and feel and see design options for various scenarios and segments.

Moreover, it uniquely enables the binding of touch points to XMPie media personalization systems for rendering of live, data-driven previews for a selected audience segment. This link between planning and execution makes the story not just an early conceptualization of the campaign idea, but rather a “meeting-room,” or “circle of knowledge and control.” Plus, Circle’s social, interactive nature even permits users to comment on the various campaign touch points or the storyboard as a whole, enriching the team experience, empowering the client, and revealing business expectations throughout the campaign evolution.

“Circle provides us with an unlimited ‘canvas in the cloud’ where the campaign's story can be collaboratively created, previewed, refined, approved for execution, and measured,” noted Leon Schweppe, head of digital at Callprint, a U.K.-based creative technology, print media production group and XMPie beta customer. “This has greatly improved the customer understanding of the process involved in building an effective campaign. Circle makes the collaboration much more clear and professional, which improves our multichannel sales cycle. The time saved can then be used on more strategic development of our relationships and technology proposition.”