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After one week of trawling the drupa halls, I'm packing my bags and off home on my 30 hour Sydney flight. My feet are sore and I've had as much bratwurst, beer and pork knuckles that I can take for the next four years, until drupa 2012.
On reflection, drupa 2008 has been an interesting show for variable-data publishing. While this year's drupa certainly can't claim to be "the VDP drupa", several key announcements and technology demonstrations have been made from different vendors, which is an indicator that the VDP market continues to emerge and shape to meet changing market demands.
One key trend I've seen inside (and outside) of drupa is the shift in VDP from production software, to a marketing platform. We're starting to see data hygene tools, asset management, campaign scheduling and other marketing-centric tools integrated into complete solutions, where VDP just forms one part of a much larger, marketing campaign toolset. A second emerging trend we're seeing is marketing automation. I'm referring to the ability to produce VDP on-demand triggered by an event (trigger-based marketing), such as DM production for service reminders, lease renewals, etc. While no VDP solution provider can actually offer these type of integrated marketing solutions today, I'm aware that several vendors are either working on such development, or plan to start soon.
In summary, drupa 2008 has provided a strong showcase of current, emerging and future VDP technologies. I'm looking forward to monitoring post-drupa developments and watching how these next-generation VDP solutions will help our print service providers of today make the transition to the marketing service providers of tomorrow.
Posted on Wednesday, 4 June 2008 at 10:08 AM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/149
Hi Eliot,
I think the main VDP news came from Adobe. They are now talking about PDF/VT (variable transactional). While for many years they just stood by to watch almost every vendor getting involved in the development of some flavor of PPML, they now are talking about developing this variable data containers within PDF!
I'm curious to better understand which vendors are involved in this, and how this is progressing. Anyone know more?
Posted by Hans Huijsing on Tuesday, 17 June 2008 at 9:11 PM
Hans, I agree, PDF/VT is very interesting although somewhat premature. I'm surprised that many vendors are already talking about PDF/VT when it's not a published standard yet and won't be until sometime next year. However, I see PDF Print Engine as the driving force behind PDF/VT. PDF Print Engine only consumes PDF so Adobe has naturally been keen to establish a format optimised for VDP and PDF Print Engine. It's definitely one to watch—but what we really need right now is a published standard to work from!
Posted by Eliot Harper on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 at 9:56 PM