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Introduction As the print industry matures and print volumes are threatened by alternative media, print service providers must reexamine and reengineer their basic business models and operations protocols to adapt to the changing business climate. For the savvy print service provider, revenue growth and increased profit will be dependent upon two critical factors: cost reduction via the introduction of new workflow efficiencies, and an expanded portfolio of higher-margin value-added services. Although better/faster/cheaper presses, digital printers, and pre-and post-printing devices will certainly play a significant role in advancing both of these objectives, it will be the software driving these devices, as well as other software solutions up and down the value chain, that will provide differentiation to the print service provider and the solutions vendor. In late 2004, InfoTrends/CAP Ventures conducted a landmark study on the print production software market. The study entitled, The Global Print Production Workflow Market: Enabling Fundamental Business Change in Graphic Arts is the first of this magnitude to examine this growing market. Research for this study consisted of telephone and Web-based surveys of software and solutions vendors as well as print service providers. Below are just a few of the key findings. The Global Production Workflow Software Market InfoTrends/CAP Ventures estimates that worldwide production workflow software solutions tracked in our study represented a $5.9 billion market in 2003. Print controllers and RIPs for digital devices accounted for the largest portion of this market at just slightly over $2.0 billion. Production-class creative applications also composed a sizable segment of just under $1.5 billion. North America was the largest geographical market for print production software in 2003, accounting for 46% of all revenues. Western Europe accounted for over one-third of revenues and Japan came in third, accounting for 10% of the market revenues. Figure 1: 2003 Global Print Production Workflow Software
Production Workflow Software Outlook InfoTrends/CAP Ventures expects the global production software market to demonstrate a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 8.3%, moving from $5.9 billion in 2003 to over $8.8 billion in 2008. At the same time, we believe that this growth does not tell the whole story about a market that has a combination of low revenue growth categories that depress overall growth and other revenue categories with strong growth. The print business is undergoing a dramatic transformation on a global basis. To survive, service providers will need to transform their establishments into super-efficient organizations and expand their businesses with new value-added services that solve customers’ business issues. Several in-scope software categories within the Production Workflow Software market are key enablers of such a transformation and are expected to experience considerable growth. The new and evolving category of hybrid offset-digital production workflow management solutions will show the greatest increase, experiencing an extraordinary CAGR of 98% through 2008, albeit from an extremely small base. Placements of production digital printing devices (specifically color devices) in predominantly offset environments and the migration of existing offset, digital, or internally-developed hybrid workflow management software solutions are the key drivers that are contributing to this growth. Figure 2: Print Production Software Comparitive Growth Rates, 2003-2008
Other key growth areas for the market include print-e business software, variable data design and production solutions, and digital production workflow management solutions, representing respective CAGRs of 20%, 16%, and 15%. The preceding is an excerpt from InfoTrends/CAP Ventures’ study entitled The Global Print Production Workflow Market: Enabling Fundamental Business Change in Graphic Arts. The complete study is available immediately. For more information on this and other InfoTrends/CAP Ventures reports or to make a purchase, please visit our online report store at https://store.infotrendsresearch.com/ or contact Alison Hipp at , ext. 126 or . |
