Seebass, who founded Xinet in 1991, said: "Right now, if you're a printer and you don't do asset management you'd have a hard time being competitive because you can't do things as cheaply as your competitors.

"It's something that's so common now in most of the industry that if you don't have it, it's a disadvantage. It's like, 'of course you have a platesetter', you have to have certain things in order to be competitive."

Xinet is currently working on its next major release for its full WebNative suite of products, which will feature increased support for video and interactive content.

Seebass said: "We've already added support for most of the video formats and flash in previous releases and what we're doing now is adding more tools. We see it's important to add more and more support."

According to Seebass, the need for more cross-media tools has been driven by clients such as advertising companies and in-house corporate marketing departments.

"Almost all of those clients are doing some video and some interactive now and we're seeing pretty much every project involves some video, some interactive and some print," he said.

"So these things are sort of coming together and we spent a lot of effort recently trying to make it easier and easier to manage all those things in one single interface."

However, one feature that is unlikely to be included in this year's release, which is expected to come out in the second or third quarter, is a free text search tool that would allow users to search for text within documents as well as for document names and meta data tags.

Seebass confirmed that whilst Xinet was continuing to work on a free text search facility, it was not possible at the moment to make it work reliably. He added that, for most of the industry – especially in production terms, the metadata was "far more important than the content".

See also:

Xinet launches its updated software