An Interview with Amos Michelson
August 2004
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Creo CEO Amos Michelson shares his vision of the printing industry and the direction he has established for Creo.
AS PACKAGE PRINTING gets ever more complex and demanding, it appears likely that the ultimate solution for these challenges comes down to ones and zeroes, or in another word—digitization. This solution represents the vision that Creo CEO Amos Michelson has for the printing industry as a whole—what he calls "complete digitization, from idea to delivery."
The beginnings of this digitization can be seen in some of the current trends sweeping through the commercial printing markets, says Michelson, trends such as variable data printing and short runs. These started a few years ago in the commercial arena, initially with marketing promotions. As is usually the case with technology trends in printing, packaging will lag the commercial sector by a few years. This would put it in the very early stages of adoption in package printing.
While variable data printing is one of the more visible aspects of the current state of digitization, there is an underlying trend that is a key element in the vision of complete digitization, says Michelson. "Designers are, and will need to be, much more connected into the converting process. Eventually, creatives will have the tools they need to create totally clean PDF files, and operators at the printers' facilities will need to focus on exceptions only."
Create, and ready to print. There's a lot of technology that underlies such a simple phrase, but Michelson says some of the more advanced commercial printers are already going down this path. He also points out another important aspect of this trend—more and more prepress work is moving, and will continue to move, into converters' operations. This will hold true for both commercial and package printing.
Driving the vision
The path towards digitization will require much work for both printers and prepress solutions providers. To position Creo to be at the forefront of these efforts, Michelson has organized the company around four strategic initiatives.
The thrust of the Value in Print Initiative is to allow printers to take advantage of the precision in Creo's thermal imaging technologies. This initiative has spawned core technologies such as SQUAREspot® that uses 10,000-dpi optical resolution to provide consistently sharp edge definition to the dot. "The power of this technology is its edge sharpness, which is six times better than the competition," says Michelson.
AS PACKAGE PRINTING gets ever more complex and demanding, it appears likely that the ultimate solution for these challenges comes down to ones and zeroes, or in another word—digitization. This solution represents the vision that Creo CEO Amos Michelson has for the printing industry as a whole—what he calls "complete digitization, from idea to delivery."
The beginnings of this digitization can be seen in some of the current trends sweeping through the commercial printing markets, says Michelson, trends such as variable data printing and short runs. These started a few years ago in the commercial arena, initially with marketing promotions. As is usually the case with technology trends in printing, packaging will lag the commercial sector by a few years. This would put it in the very early stages of adoption in package printing.
While variable data printing is one of the more visible aspects of the current state of digitization, there is an underlying trend that is a key element in the vision of complete digitization, says Michelson. "Designers are, and will need to be, much more connected into the converting process. Eventually, creatives will have the tools they need to create totally clean PDF files, and operators at the printers' facilities will need to focus on exceptions only."
Create, and ready to print. There's a lot of technology that underlies such a simple phrase, but Michelson says some of the more advanced commercial printers are already going down this path. He also points out another important aspect of this trend—more and more prepress work is moving, and will continue to move, into converters' operations. This will hold true for both commercial and package printing.
Driving the vision
The path towards digitization will require much work for both printers and prepress solutions providers. To position Creo to be at the forefront of these efforts, Michelson has organized the company around four strategic initiatives.
The thrust of the Value in Print Initiative is to allow printers to take advantage of the precision in Creo's thermal imaging technologies. This initiative has spawned core technologies such as SQUAREspot® that uses 10,000-dpi optical resolution to provide consistently sharp edge definition to the dot. "The power of this technology is its edge sharpness, which is six times better than the competition," says Michelson.
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