Alon Bar-Shany, Vice President of the HP Indigo Division, co-leads the division to create best-in-class digital presses for the commercial and industry printing markets.

Q: How will the HP Indigo division showcase its position in the graphic arts industry at PRINT '09?

A: We will be emphasising that a full range of high-productivity solutions are commercially available, including the new HP Indigo W7200 Press, a next-generation, dual-engine, web-fed press that offers a duty cycle of nearly four million double-sided, four-colour pages per month. PRINT '09 will mark general availability for this press following a series of successful beta installations worldwide.

Two additional press models, the HP Indigo 7000 and WS6000, are also essential production engines. Both have had highly successful commercial introductions, with the HP Indigo 7000 Press already installed in more than 20 countries. It will serve as a key production device to help customers grow their businesses through the peak production season for photo speciality products.

The HP Indigo WS6000 Press's ability to cost-effectively produce 80 percent of the work done by analogue flexographic presses gives it strong momentum in the converting industry, which is now seeing the benefits of digital for mainstream, higher-volume label production.

Q: How are you helping customers win new business?

A: We are helping them by going into offerings like training and business consulting through the HP Graphic Arts Capture Business Success programme and the HP-sponsored Digital Solutions Cooperative (Dscoop) users group.

Q: What additional tools help customers see these opportunities?

A: One of our most recent achievements was the launch of the HP Indigo SmartPlanner, a new job estimator tool that provides detailed, tactical analogue and digital costing information. This was deployed earlier this year.

Q: How has digital printing taken off in the market segments your division serves?

A: Photo and print-on-demand (POD) book manufacturing have been some of the strongest areas; labels and packaging continue to make advancements in the conversion from analogue to digital.

The photo opportunity represents one of the most compelling cases for print. Photography has effectively transitioned to digital, so consumers have convenient ways to transport images. Digitally printed products like the photo book are natural outgrowths of this scenario. Important in this market is that printing technologies offer the quality consumers are used to seeing in their photo prints.

In POD books, our customers have opened up a digital market that was once exclusively monochrome to additional book genres – such as cookbooks, children's books, and photography books – that are not fully served with anything less than higher-quality, higher-volume digital colour output.

Q: What role does workflow play in making these applications successful?

A: A central one, for every business in the graphics space. In production printing, the HP SmartStream portfolio offers accessible advanced solutions. Our newest HP SmartStream offering, HP SmartStream Director, is an end-to-end workflow automation solution which became commercially available earlier this year. HP SmartStream Director will be a big part of the workflow advancements HP will be talking about at PRINT '09.