One of the leading suppliers is Agfa with its Apogee systems. Agfa has appeared to often be a step ahead of the other suppliers in implementing new functionality. It was, to my recollection, the first major supplier to offer a PDF workflow and, with its Delano systems (now called Portal), one of the first suppliers to offer a fully managed system outside of just pre-press. One of the most interesting new developments in workflow at Drupa last year, and one of the least commented upon, was the Apogee Media system. This was the first time I had seen a content management and editorial creative solution as a part of the overall package from a major single- source supplier: Apogee Media is a full internet-based editorial system using Adobe InDesign CS4 with a digital asset management system.

Agfa has sourced technology from Spanish developer Seinet, which has been extended using well-established Apogee components into an integrated publishing solution, developed in Java (J2EE) and XML. This integrates with the Adobe InDesign platform to provide multi-user creative design and flexible page layout tools.

Providing a link
The concept of Apogee Media is to provide the link between print buyers, such as publishers, advertising agencies, brand owners and corporations, and print producers. I was interested to find how Agfa was doing with Apogee Media because it appears to be aimed at a different type of customer than the normal Apogee users.

Apogee Prepress is one of the most successful workflow products in the industry, and I am told that there are more than 6,000 worldwide installations. Apogee Portal (Delano) has more than 300 installations, and Apogee Media has 30 installations worldwide with around 300 seats. In fact, Agfa has set up a dedicated sales operation for Apogee Media with 15 staff selling and supporting sales into Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, North America, Scandinavia and the UK. Agfa is targeting a new market area and is entering a competitive landscape and looking to move upstream to where content is created. By doing this they are taking on many of the existing editorial workflow suppliers, such as Woodwing, K4 and Atex. Agfa differentiates itself from these other suppliers by the scale of its business, with its worldwide operations and its links with the production areas of the market.

In workflow for magazines Agfa has had great success. In the UK for example many of the major magazine printers including St Ives, Wyndeham Heron, Garnett Dickinson, Precision Colour Printing, Stephens & George and Pensord are major users of full Apogee workflows with fully automated operations. Among the Apogee Media installations is Decom in Belgium which has a 40-seat installation and has just announced that through its use of Apogee Media it has managed to shorten production times and further simplify the communication chain with customers. Roger de Laet, chief executive of Decom, said: "Apogee Media offers our clients a powerful but user-friendly online editorial workspace that is transparent, open and future-oriented."

Agfa's move into this new market is a very significant change in its business model. It has chosen to partner with Seinet - a leader in advanced internet-based content management solutions - to develop a modern solution that extends Apogee into a new and potentially large market area.

While it is aiming predominantly at magazine publishers, it could have major benefits for printers with Apogee Prepress and Portal wanting to extend their businesses into new value added areas.

Many small magazine and newspaper publishers don't have advanced content management systems, so magazine or even newspaper printers could use Apogee Media to provide added services to their customers. This is a significant directional change for Agfa in these difficult times.

Andrew Tribute is a journalist and consultant in digital pre-press and pre-media marketing technology. See: www.attributes.co.uk