Coldset Printing Partners (CPP) originated in 2010 as the joint venture of the cold set printers of Belgium’s largest media groups Corelio and Concentra. It is the largest newspaper printer in Belgium and part of Mediahuis. To build out a central control center for both printing sites CPP turned to Agfa Offset Solutions (now ECO3).
The project, encompassing the set-up of a 'virtual print center' by ECO3, started in 2012. In March 2013 all requirements were considered to be fulfilled and the project was delivered. The Arkitex software was installed on ECO3's IT infrastructure and hosted in its secure data centers. These data centers are connected to the printing sites without interruption. All data transferred by the newsrooms end up on ECO3's servers. In the data centers these data are made print-ready before they are sent to the newspaper printing sites.
“When the team of ECO3 proposed to manage all prepress activities in the cloud, we thought that they had lost their minds,” said Tony Nouwen, Graphic expert for system, color and quality management at Concentra Media. “Now that we see how our operations are even faster, more smooth and more efficient at even higher production volumes, we can rightly state that this is the cleverest job that ECO3 has done for us in our twenty-five years of being a loyal customer.”
Faster, more flexible, more cost-efficient
Today the result is a far-reaching application of private cloud hosting. It makes CPP the first newspaper group in the world to have its prepress operations fully in the cloud. For them the change means shorter intervention times, since ECO can now directly work on their servers. Thanks to the continuous monitoring the stability of the systems improved too. Furthermore, the switch resulted in significant savings, because CPP doesn't need to make expensive investments in infrastructure and software, nor in maintenance of in-house servers. ECO3 offers the complete project as a paid service to CPP. The CMTPS (Cloud, Managed and Technical Professional Services) team offers a service for the infrastructure of the servers, networks and data centers. They operate the complete systems for the prepress activities of the CPP printing sites 24/7 so that possible problems are avoided or can be immediately solved.
The choice for Arkitex Cloud was well-considered. Corelio and Concentra had been using ECO3’s prepress systems for almost 25 years already, including workflow software. They were thus very much aware of our expertise and know-how in the field of newspaper printing and valued our focus on speed and flexibility.