I have observed an interesting phenomenon in our industry over the last year or so. I have watched the spending of technology dollars shift from new technology purchases to the integration of existing technology in a custom workflow portal. I sense that customers are tired of all the pieces not playing nicely together. So, instead of waiting for the vendors to fix this problem they have gone about building their own internet based portals that tie all the pieces they like to use together.
I am writing about this now because in two weeks GraphExpo will be behind us. As always my main goal there will be presenting our products to the buying public, but I also plan to keep my eyes open for fellow vendors selling this strategy. For us it is not so much a strategy as what the ProofPass.com server technology was built for.
Us technology geeks can make almost any two pieces of software or hardware play nicely together, the process can be immensely painful and costly if the two pieces in question are not built to be open. Over the last year I have learned just how important this openness is as I have watched multiple customers of ours integrate a ProofPass.com server into their own internet based portal.
Here are some good questions to keep in mind as you look at new and existing technology at GraphExpo (or anytime for that matter);
- Is the product built with open source tools?
- Will the product run on a standard web server?
- Does the product make use of an SQL database that is not locked down?
- Will the vendor provide access to the architecture via third party products?
- Will the vendor provide source code for non-proprietary portions of the system?
I admit to being a bit biased because we can answer yes to all of the above questions as they relate to our server based product. I can tell you, however, that if I was buying technology in today’s graphic arts market, I would insist upon products and companies that answered yes to most if not all of the above questions.
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