In June I spent two weeks in lovely Dusseldorf, Germany, exhibiting in the Innovation Park at Drupa.  This is the largest printing related show in the World and occurs only once every 4 years because of the size and expense.  It sets the agenda for the graphics arts and commercial printing industry worldwide for the following 4 years.

There were a number of things that really impressed me about both Dusseldorf and the Drupa itself:

• Dusseldorf is amazing in terms of public transportation. We were able to stay within 2 miles of the Messe (the exhibit center where Drupa is held) and get there usually in less than 30 minutes riding one bus and then a very packed surface train (that seemed to come every couple of minutes at rush hour). And the street cars made it easy to get down to what is called the "Alt Stadt" or old town where hundreds of restaurants and night spots crowd as near to the Rhein as possible.
• Drupa itself consisted of 20 some separate buildings, about 1/3 of which were of interest to me. The rest were taken up with everything needed to run a commercial printing operation - paper sorting and handling, mailing, coatings, ink, etc.
• The really big exhibitors among the printer OEMs and Workflow SW vendors were Heidelberg (with 2 complete buildings to itself near the main entrance), Kodak, HP, Xerox, Agfa, Canon, FujiFilm, EskoArtworks, Ricoh/IBM, Oce, Konica Minolta, Xeikon, Adobe and Epson.
• Other customers of ours were there with a smaller, but still visible presence including Oki Europe, Sharp, Toshiba Europe, Emtex, and OneVision.
• Noticeably missing was Microsoft. I could only find the Microsoft Dynamix people in a small booth selling MIS systems.
• What struck me immediately after spending some time at the show was the number of companies that build and test interpreters, RIPs, converters, importers and workflows that process the PDLs we have tests for. Yet, only a few of them like EFI, Oce, Canon, Konica Minolta and Global Graphics are long-time customers of ours. Even though we provide our test suites to HP, Xerox and Kodak, our customers in those companies are not the high-end commercial and graphics arts systems engineering but rather consumer and office products engineering teams.
• Yet anyone processing a PDF file could take advantage of our test methodology and test suites. We just never spent much time with these companies and until recently didn't really have a robust PDF test suite to offer to companies that have been working with PDF for 15 years.
• We do now and Mark Lewiecki, the PDF Engine Product Manager at Adobe, sent people our way who were looking for comprehensive test suites for the PDF Engine 2.

 Some of the observations and conclusions I came away with included:

• QualityLogic occupies a very unique position in the print domain and has an opportunity to extend it further with the graphics arts/commercial print system companies.
• We are not well known (although some remember Genoa) in the commercial printing domain but there seem to be at least two dozen companies that we should be able to add as customers.
• Because of the relative maturity and stability of the industry, wherever there is any growth opportunity of significance, there are also dozens of companies that jump in, mostly companies already in the industry looking for growth opportunities. Growth in this industry seems to come at the expense of someone else rather than actual increases in the size of the pie. There are ways to grow as demonstrated by the leaders through consolidation, technical innovation and aggressive marketing. While everyone at Drupa gets very excited about greater feeds and speeds of printing, in reality they are looking at incremental advances and not major revolutionary ones - e.g., it has taken nine years for JDF to evolve to practical use and that is fast in this industry.
• There are still some areas of growth that: color, variable data printing, workflow SW and cross-media publishing. The latter two are areas with net growth that continue to evolve rapidly and present new opportunities.

 In short, when 400,000 people descend on a town like Dusseldiorf over a 2 week period for a printing industry show there is a lot to learn and pay attention to.