e-Business Technologies Essential to Print Provider Growth: New InfoTrends Report Profiles Technolog

Infotrends: The economics of creating, managing, producing, and distributing print are changing. Service providers must add capabilities to their offerings to continue to meet emerging customer needs. Chief among these is the ability to conduct business anytime and anywhere via the vehicle that is most convenient to the customer. Implementing some form of e-business infrastructure will be critical for survival. InfoTrends projects a global growth rate of over 18% for print e-business software by 2009.

InfoTrends considers integrated customer-facing tools such as print e-business to be a critical component of the super-efficient organization. In fact, almost 1,000 document owners and print buyers indicated that over 20% of their total print expenditure was being conducted via a workflow that incorporated Internet-enabled tools, and they expected this percentage to increase at double-digit growth rates.

InfoTrends’ new product compendium entitled provides an overview of products and vendors in this product category. The document highlights the differences and variations in the primary features and focuses on any unique features that differentiate these products from one another and thereby contribute to their market position.

The products and services contained in the compendium are off-the-shelf solutions that a print service provider could use to implement e-business capabilities. Companies that provide an e-procurement interface and printing services but do not license their technology to other printers are not included in this review. The software solutions discussed all contain certain common, must-have features, all accessible via a Web site. Each company presents these features at varying levels of complexity, flexibility, and robustness.

When we last provided an in-depth review of this market in 2002, we highlighted the growing functionality of these systems and their increasing acceptance in the market, . Since then, the market has matured significantly, most large vendors offer customer-facing tools as part of their product assortment, and the range of capabilities these companies offer to support the online ordering, management, production, and distribution of printed and non-printed materials continues to expand. Production Workflow Solutions Product Compendium: Print e-Business Infrastructure Publ 20060313