MANILA – Vibal has introduced Vee Print, a new commercial division developed in partnership with HP to oversee its quality offset and digital printing business.
Vee Print is an attempt to keep the 63-year old publishing house relevant in the digital age. Based on an Inquirer.net report, it has been in the works since 2014 costing Vibal as much P182 million to establish its cloud data services and digital presses.
At the heart of the new division is HP’s first and largest digital printer installations in Southeast Asia – the T230 and the HP Indigo 550. The T230 is a full-color, 20.5-inch printer that boasts 400-feet-per-minute printing speed meant for massive print runs while the Indigo is a digital press meant for smaller projects, boasting a running speed of 68ppm (pages per minute) in full color.
Supporting the system is a dedicated cloud division based on HP infrastructure, which includes the HP 3PAR Storeserv 7200 and the HP Blade System C7000 for reliable and high-speed processing.
It strengthens Vibal’s existing revenue streams and opens new ones, says Lisa Watson, commercial business development manager at Hewlett-Packard (HP) HP Asia Pacific.
Watson, also the chairman of the Direct Marketing Association of Singapore, flew in this Friday to grace the launch of Vee Print and the media plant tour for the media.
To her, one of the biggest benefits of digital printing is the elimination of minimum print runs, allowing the company to be more flexible and print more personalized content.
Among Watson’s examples is Picaboo, a California-based company that allows users to build their own customized yearbooks complete with their theme, color and photos of choice. Most memorable of the case studies she shared was Lost My Name Book, which creates a story book with unique art based on a persons’ name.
“It’s the ability to reach and engage readers in a way that was too tedious and challenging to do with print a few years back,” she said.
“What we are seeing is a rise in more specialized and customized outputs. In the book publishing area, for instance, there might be fewer books in total but more titles due to self-published authors,” she told adobo.
“It’s a shift from volume thinking to value thinking.”
