Prinergy in a Cloud

With all the talk of virtualization in this world, I don’t see much action on the part of Kodak with regards to that. Now they may be working on this but not that anyone of us have seen. I know that prepress people buck the IT mindset as most of us are big Mac fans and its very “un-IT” to like the Mac. Some do, so don’t flame me, but generally, most do not. One thing that I have thought about over the past few weeks is what about Kodak offering a Prinergy in a cloud model.

What the heck is “Prinergy in a Cloud?” PIC as I like to call it, would be a Prinergy system hosted in one of Kodak high availability data centers running the latest and greatest versions of Prinergy and InSite software. They could offer preps licensing, RBA and all the tools of the trade, but from afar. You access all this via the internet through your company pipe and you are off to the races. No servers to install, no software to patch, no nothing.

Why would any company want to do this? Prinergy saturation is really reaching critical mass. Everyone knows Prinergy is the biggest and best, even though others try to compete, there really is no competition. Cost is one huge barrier to entry to this club. Even with Evo people are spending tens of thousands of bucks just to gain membership. Add InSite on top of that and the cost rises. Some licensing fees for an unlimited copy of InSite can be$30K or more. Plus you need a server room, you need storage to hold all the files, you need a beefy network infrastructure and a backup strategy. And I’m sure that’s not the half of the issues. What mom and pop outfit wants to get involved in that IT mess if they don’t have to?

Enter Prinergy in a cloud. Kodak can now offer end users a much less expensive point of entry into the workflow of their dreams. They can offer all the tools the big boys use, but at a much smaller foot print, and a pay as you go model. I’ll leave the pricing up to the brain trust in Rochester for that. Some changes would need to happen with Prinergy like new access rights in workshop where people who log in only see jobs that they are entitled to see, like in InSite, that sort of thing. How to access the storage over the internet would also need to be addressed, but bigger hurdles have been overcome.

Bandwidth is getting cheaper every day so that should not be an issue. Certainly you are not going to run a 1000 plate a day operation on this type of deal, but 50-100 plates…maybe. Kodak service would be thrilled about this. The RC is already in place and all you would need to do is place a call and the rest is up to Kodak. No Kodak RSS to install, no onsite visits. Think about prep houses or even comp houses that have no plating operations, even better. Upload your PDF files to the cloud, bing, bang, boom…you have a ripped, trapped, color managed PDF files in no time. Your files are ready to be approved by your customer via InSite, exported, and downloaded or whatever. No worrying about Prinergy upgrades, OS patches, virus updates or any of that nonsense.

Think about it and let me know. Kodak, do you have your ears on?