Friday, October 19, 2012

Printing from the cloud

Startups & Venture Capital

HubCast delivers cloud-based printing services

 

Premium content from Boston Business Journal by Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Friday, October 19, 2012

Tony Dolph, president of HubCast in Wakefield, is looking to bring the printing process into the 21st century.
W. Marc Bernsau
In some cases, businesses can spend as much (or more) money shipping printed materials as they do printing them. Meanwhile, of the printed materials that are warehoused for future shipping, about a third are thrown away — useless before they’re even used.
“It seems archaic, and it is archaic,” said Tony Dolph, president of Wakefield-based HubCast, which aims to bring the premium printing process into the 21st century.
Through its cloud-based service, HubCast gives its customers the ability to load, store, manage, and order printed materials on demand, and ultimately have them printed close to their destination and then delivered. All told, this process not only drastically reduces printing and shipping costs, Dolph said, but it cuts down on the various environmental impacts that come from long-distance shipping and freight.
The company has partnerships with premium print suppliers in 50 countries, and its platform manages the full supply chain — pricing, routing, production, quality assurance, all the way to “the last mile of delivery,” Dolph explained.
Founded in 2005, HubCast is backed by $12.4 million in funding from Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Ascent Venture Partners. The company’s latest financing, a $4.3 million Series B round closed in late September, has been targeted for general expansion.
Dolph said the company is seeing “very robust” revenue growth, though he declined to offer specific dollar amounts. The company serves roughly 600 customers — typically companies with large global footprints in health and life sciences, manufacturing, and various technology fields, he said.
“We have grand ambitions,” Dolph said. “We want to be in every country and every region with next-day service, so no matter where you are and where you want to go, we can accommodate that.”
Although cost is certainly a factor, the advantage of using HubCast is “mainly in efficiency,” said Sean Ogarrio, senior manager of creative services at JDS Uniphase Corp. The Milpitas, Calif.-based company has 80 global locations and 5,000 employees, and provides optical, test and management products for the communications industry. JDS has used HubCast for more than a year now, typically for lower-volume runs of sales materials overseas, Ogarrio said.
“It’s printing only the amount that you need, when you need it, and more importantly, where you need it,” he said.
Ultimately, experts say this model positions HubCast for the future of printing. Commercial printing is shrinking, with a “major shift” from analog to digital printing taking place, said Gartner research director Pete Basiliere.
Over the next decade, the amount and types of print will also change; Basiliere noted the trend toward fewer office-printed pages, and more presentation and marketing materials displayed on mobile phones and tablets.
“The transition from pages to pixels is accelerating, no question,” he said in an email.
But HubCast is “well positioned” for this change, Basiliere said, because it “enables a wide range of print, and in dispersed, digital forms.”
“Those are the more valuable pages and products,” he said, “so the future for well-done, digital print is quite relevant, much more so than today.”
Dolph said he sees the old model of order-print-warehouse-ship-throw-away slipping into obsolescence.
“We see it increasingly evolving into an on-demand model,” he said. “It’s a trend that is going to accelerate and will become the new norm — simply because it makes a whole lot of sense, both physically and economically.”

Original story link here.

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