As a reminder, The Cloud is perceived as the computer platform for the future. This is where all applications and data are held remotely over the Internet rather than using large data centres or personal computers for handling applications and data storage. This is already being seen with applications such as Google Apps that provides facilities similar to Microsoft Office where no applications are downloaded and where data is held remotely.

It is perhaps wrong to say that we are not using data centres for handling data. We are using huge data centres such as major Google data centres. The basic approach of working with The Cloud is that we can generate and access data from anywhere with any device where a device could be a mobile phone, a tablet such as an Apple iPad, a laptop or a personal computer.

The latest move in this area of computing is the planned Google Cloud Print that will be a part of its forthcoming Chrome operating system, and from HP with the announcement of Cloud Aware Printers that can print data from Google Apps without the need for a computer.

Why should this be of interest to the printing industry when the capabilities of these Cloud Aware printers will be very limited in producing office type documents? One may well ask why then was desktop publishing and the PostScript language so important when introduced in 1984 when it could do so little in terms of quality typesetting and page layout? The reason it is important is that The Cloud will be an ongoing huge area of development and that all computing applications will be developed up from the bottom with simple applications, up to the top with the most complex applications.

Despite many people’s beliefs, printing and publishing has always been one of the most intensive and advanced areas of development of IT. If one looks back, printing and publishing has often been way ahead of other areas of IT development in adopting new approaches to work. If one looks back in the 1970s, companies like Hendrix and Atex were way ahead of other IT areas in the use of high performance video based editing using linked mini computers. The introduction of desktop publishing and PostScript was driven by the printing and publishing markets and eventually forced the office applications that used code based approaches and simple print drivers to switch to icon based operating systems and typographically aware printers.

Now printing and publishing has being operating with remote working for many years, but not in a mode where data and applications are held remotely. We have been able to print remotely for years with special applications from companies like EFI. What we have not really had however is the ability to run applications from remote locations that we have not purchased and downloaded to our computers.

I have wondered for years why there have not been ‘pay as you use’ printing and publishing applications. Many years ago Fujifilm launched an application called MyFujiFilm that was defined as a shared prepress application where users paid on a usage basis.

Unfortunately, while the applications worked it appeared that the market was not ready to take up such a new approach to computing. Today we are starting to see a change in approach with many publishers and application developers starting to move towards Cloud-based approaches. For example in the UK, RedTie has a superb sort of Cloud based web to print system. What we have seen is a switch to browser-based applications rather than having specially developed graphic user interfaces on most applications today.

In the next couple of years I believe we will see a major push by certain major companies to switch us away from hosted applications on our own hardware using applications such as Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and others to Cloud based applications. These may come from companies like Google or from new companies. This will be interesting as it will be a move on from Open Source applications where such applications will move into The Cloud.

What is difficult to assess is how this will affect high-volume commercial printing. I cannot at this stage see Cloud Enabled presses rather than printers. However, I feel the prepress or premedia process will switch totally to Cloud based working. What will be interesting is who will be in control and manage the data. Will major publishers run their own own Cloud based operations or will they be happy to pass control to companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle and others?

What our industry has to accept however is that this change will happen and we will have to work out how to work with The Cloud. Changes will take time to happen as we follow the mass market applications like Google Apps.

Will this mean we will see a drop in quality as we move down to Cloud Apps in the same way quality changed when we switched from dedicated typesetting applications to desktop publishing? Whichever way it happens, it is inevitable and this industry will have to adopt The Cloud as the future printing and publishing platform. We must be ready for this and control the change rather than having it happen with the industry becoming a follower rather than a leader.

Comment below to have your say on this story.

If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.  

Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter