The deal, which was made last fall, will enable Standard Register to provide its clients in the healthcare, finance, industrial and commercial business space color-critical documents and consistent branding across print and web-based platforms, both companies noted.

"In the digital production sales circle, this is a very significant order," Xerox VP graphic communications MAO Brian Leedy told PrintWeek.

"In the case of this client, as well as others, it was driven by the need to move to a digital solution from a commercial print standpoint. We’ve heard a lot of over the years about the move from offset to digital, and this is just the commercial extension of that."

Leedy added that in addition to providing the digital press platform, Xerox also worked with Standard Register to help it become G7 certified as a master printer both at the press site as well as the enterprise level.

Because Standard Register has customers with a national reach but with plenty of local offices, Xerox also helped it create a comprehensive color management system that’s enterprise-wide.

"Where you are managing color across the enterprise, from a manufacturing standpoint, what you get in California, you’ll get in New York City or Atlanta," said Leedy.

Finally, Xerox educated the Standard Register sales and manufacturing force on the elements of color. "It’s not just, 'Push the button, get a file and print it'. It is, 'What are the elements of file creation, how do you manage files, what goes into getting out what the customer expects?' It's about understanding color from the technology up."

The iGen purchases were part of a $7 million digital investment by Standard Register announced last fall that also included HP Indigos and ORIS solutions.

Joe Klenke, vice president of Standard Register’s Commercial Markets business unit, who oversees 20 digital, five rotary and four label facilities, as well as 19 distribution centers, told PrintWeek: "The reason we invested in the iGen and Indigo was to improve our ability to help manage brand standards and consistency for large enterprises.

"We’ve got well over 100 devices and we bought the iGens and Indigos to be able to hit high color more specifically than we could. We want to be able to manage critical color from a multi-site network that will give us advantage over other options that are in the marketplace."

Klenke noted Standard Register still does a lot of offset production as well, but added: "Increasingly, we are migrating our customers into a digital environment. We were one of the first buyers of the Xerox DocuTech back in the early ‘90s, so we’ve been at that for a long time for both mono and color."

Leedy would not predict whether this particular sale to Standard Register is a sign that 2012 will be a boom year for the company’s digital press sales. However, he did note: "We see the growth the color digital print being in substantial double digits for the coming years. The room for growth – not only in digital, but in the conversion of offset and digital – is immense."

Leedy was also diplomatic when asked whether the financial struggles of some competitors in the digital commercial press space has created some new opportunities for Xerox. "I don’t believe it’s having an effect on our sales positively or negatively," he added. "You hate to see anybody struggle, but from a market perspective, they’re probably performing at the levels they expected to perform at."