Artwork Systems managing director Guido Van der Schueren revealed that his company paid 10 m for Enfocus two weeks ago, but a deal based on future profitability could add another 20m over several years. Artwork Systems made profits of 9.7m on revenues of 28.7m last year, so Enfocus represents a major investment. He said that part of the reasoning was to move Artwork out of its niche as a packaging and labels software developer into the wider graphic arts marketplace. At Drupa, Artwork announced Nexus, a new workflow management solution.
Enfocus will remain as a separate business unit within the Artwork group, managed by Camps and his original team. Currently 24 people work at Enfocus in offices in Ghent and San Francisco, whereas Artwork employs 110. Camp said that Enfocus intends to concentrate almost exclusively on PDF utilities based on its PitStop editing, pre-flight and production product, plus PitStop Server which support automatic checking and rule-based alterations. The earlier PostScript utilities Tailor and DoubleCheck will be sold, maintained and occasionally updated, but he doesn't foresee any major developments in future.
The company has a number of OEM deals with pre-press manufacturers to incorporate PitStop Server into workflow management systems. These include Agfa (Apogee), CreoScitex (Brisque), Fuji (Celebrant NT), Heidelberg (Prinergy) and Vio (for a planned on-line service).
At Drupa Enfocus previewed new features for Pitstop. The next upgrade will handle automatic process-to-spot conversions based on predefined colour combination values, and it can also remap colour for different printer gamuts. Down-sampling of resolutions for web or proof printer use is added. Page numbering can be automatically updated if editing causes a change, though this does not apply to numbers within indices. Finally, item "scrubbing" can automatically delete unwanted effects such as live hyperlinks in documents which are being repurposed from web to print.
