Under the motto of “Digitalizing Communication! Digitalizing Business Processes!”, this year’s Comparting conference, held November 9-10 in Germany, was all about how digitalization affects the document and output management for enterprises as well as print service providers. Keypoint Intelligence’s Pat McGrew had the honor to provide the keynote titled: “Let’s Get Digital!” Other presentations also focused around the topic of digital transformation of customer communications. And, of course, Compart’s latest innovation, DocBridge Impress, had a central role at the conference.
Compart, who celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, has successfully hosted this annual event since 2005 with the number of participants increasing each year. More than 400 people from 14 countries world-wide attended the conference, representing a 10% increase over last year. The number of participants outside of Germany almost doubled from 25% in 2016 to 40% this year and reflects Compart’s growing international business.
Business Update
Although working in his role for more than one year already, Thorsten Meudt, CMO at Compart, had his debut by opening this year’s conference. Looking back at the past 12 months, Compart have been seeing solid growth, Thorsten said. This growth is mainly driven by growth in international markets, expansion in the public sector, and the development of the partner business, Thorsten continued.
Announced a New Modular Architecture
Looking forward, Thorsten shared some of Compart’s observations of the market. Today, digitalization is a main concern of our customers driving complexity in print production workflows. Customers are putting emphasis on solutions that are modular, flexible, and allow for easy integration. To address these changes in requirements, Compart announced the gradual transition to a new modular architecture for its product portfolio. Thorsten explained that Compart will introduce this new architecture, starting with its latest product DocBridge Impress. Other products will be converted to the new architecture over time.
A Recipe for Going Digital
The keynote from Pat McGrew focused on the value of open, component-based communication solutions that separates physical file formats from the solutions used to create them. Nothing in the Keypoint Intelligence surveys indicates that support for a specific print file format is a communication differentiator. In practice, building solutions around specific file formats often leads to a reluctance to keep system upgraded and opening the door to new features.
Pat advised attendees to do a comprehensive review of their communication ecosystem following a crawl, walk, and run plan. This plan begins with understanding the current communication requirement and moves on to a review of the physical delivery systems. Finally, Pat asked that attendees look at the possibilities offered by moving to open standards. Using software to its greatest extent frees human and financial resources, freeing capital for new hardware and software investments.
DEKRA Customer Pilots DocBridge Impress
DEKRA is an inspection and certification company specialized on the safety of human interaction with technology and the environment in the areas of automotive, industrial, and personnel. Mobile communications is a key requirements for DEKRA today, but challenging to implement in its complex IT landscape. Being a long-year Compart customer, DEKRA decided to replace its existing Dope.Compose solution (a formatting solution especially for print production environments developed by Compart) by DocBridge Impress. DocBridge Impress is integrated as a central output management service creating PDF-A for archiving purposes as well as HTML5 for display on mobile devices for more than 300 different forms.
InfoTrends Opinion
Comparting 2017 was again a great success with multiple innovative use cases demonstrating successful digital transformations of document and output management. The conference’s motto: “Digitalizing Communication! Digitalizing Business Processes!”, also marks a turning point for Compart as a company, which traditionally is strongly rooted in print output environments, as it is gearing up for the new digital age. We already are looking forward to Comparting 2018!
@davidstabel and @PatMcGrew
InfoTrends, a division of Keypoint Intelligence, continues to track the customer communications and production workflow markets with primary research, forecasts, and being an active participant in this community! For more information on our insights and services, contact Deanna Flanick today at deanna.flanick@keypointintelligence.com!
