Roberto Anzola - ISIS Papyrus
In a new, updated Q&A, Roberto Anzola shares his views on the past, present and future of AFP and the Consortium – and how they’ve changed in the years since our last interview with him.
Q: Why do you feel the AFP Consortium is important to the print industry? Has your view of the role of the AFP Consortium changed in your time working with it?
Roberto: The AFP Consortium has been important to the print industry since its inception, but its role has evolved over the years. To break down that evolution, I'd like to focus on three periods: ten years ago, today, and five years in the future.
Ten years ago, the Consortium, by then already 5 years old, was reborn as an open standards body - an important step towards broadening the visibility of the architecture. The Consortium was a catalyst for collaboration among otherwise disparate sectors with, at times, divergent interests: the printing industry, the tools and converters industry, the paper-based enterprise communication platforms industry. The AFP Consortium turned these differing perspectives into an asset, bringing multiple perspectives together around a table to jointly participate in the evolution of the architecture. Our main objective has always been to grow the capabilities of AFP to meet user needs, irrespective of the channel – print, email, web presentment, or anything else.
Today, the result of such collaboration is clear: AFP has gained new functionality in many areas, ranging from graphics to color management, on up to the current moment, when strides are being made in the formalization of the logical document structure – that is to say, metadata.
Five years into the future, AFP will enter its 40th year in an even more connected world, where Universal Accessibility will be the norm. The groundwork the Consortium is laying today will be leveraged for increasingly sophisticated use cases, such as multi-language and distributed document composition workflows. I see the role of the Consortium as being central to guiding the architecture in these directions in the years to come.
Q: As the walls between different types of print continue to lower, and print operations increasingly look to incorporate broader capabilities, such as graphic arts to complement direct mail, do you think AFP has an opportunity to grow in new areas of print?
Roberto: AFP has a well-known, strong position in transactional and TransPromo print, as well as the overall Automated Document Factory (ADF) sector, thanks to its bi-directional communication protocol (IPDS). Gaining richer AFP functionality in the graphic arts certainly benefits the entire value chain. Of course, the Consortium’s work to define a new interchange set (IS/3) greatly helps these efforts, as does AFP/A (ISO 18565:2015), which guarantees that any compatible entity (including generators, converters, and printers) handle print files in accordance with that standard.
To aid continued growth in these areas, I would not be surprised to see the Consortium push on a further interchange set that includes the latest Enhanced Metadata.
Q: What would you say is AFP’s single greatest strength? Where do you think it could most improve?
Roberto: It is difficult to pinpoint a single “greatest” strength in AFP among features such as its performance, reliability and linearity. If I may speak technically, the ability to process pages in a single pass, without the need to “look ahead” for the ensuing data is a major advantage, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the AFP architecture. This allows users to process large documents while consuming moderate resources. This contributes to overall efficiency, and even environmental sustainability, by encouraging more efficient energy use.
As for future improvements, I will say AFP has an excellent track record for ensuring backwards compatibility with technology through the ages. But today, it seems communication technologies are evolving faster than ever before. For that reason, I’d like to see similar extensibility and modularity applied to adapting to new features as they hit the market. This would require and encourage an even higher level of coordination among printers, generators and transforms.
Q: What is the one thing about AFP that you think we should know that we likely don’t today?
Roberto: AFP is a hidden ingredient behind many customer communication services. The majority of credit card letters sent in the U.S. – and of insurance policies, contracts, phone bills, and bank statements worldwide – are generated from AFP. Most of large corporations’ communications originate in AFP before they are printed, archived, and converted into various formats for different communication channels.
Q: What industries do you see AFP being leveraged the most in today? Do you think this has changed in recent years? Do you think it will change in the near future? If so, how?
Roberto: It seems every year more and more businesses and industries leverage AFP as a core technology for their communication requirements, and there are still many more that don’t yet use AFP but could benefit from it. I believe that AFP has the right qualities to build new features to grow its user base and utility. For example, AFP’s future could include a central role in multi- and omni-channel strategies where chat and social apps are the front-line of business-to-customer communication. Today, each customer relationship represents more documents, more communication, than ever before, and many of those still rely on paper at some point in the process. Considering that not that long ago, many prognosticators were saying paper was on its last legs, this has come as something of a surprise. Indeed, today's communication assets rely more on adaptability than ever, across channels.
AFP is already seeing use in multi- and omni-channel operations. It is well-positioned to continue to be of use now and into the future.
Q: A couple of years ago, we asked you where you see AFP going in the next decade, and you mentioned stronger support for creating AFP documents and printing them from mobile devices. How would you characterize AFP’s evolution on that front?
Roberto: That happened! Looking back at it, mobile was an easy bet for me to make; it’s something we in the Consortium strongly support. Observing the speed at which mobile technology has evolved and spread, businesses have already begun adjusting their communication strategies.
Although front-end technologies, like mobile, move very fast, I would never argue communicators should make concessions on security or back-end stability; that’s why AFP continues to be a central component of today's communication operations, no matter the channel. This is also why keeping AFP up to date is so important. Today, the architecture incorporates adaptive processes where print and archiving tasks can be dynamically created by business users, and dynamically viewed by mobile users, without disrupting or adding many steps to the workflow. In modern business, these capabilities are a given. AFP’s core strengths, when paired with these mobile capabilities, make for very strong solutions.
There are AFP-based offerings on the market today that allow users to create and interact with AFP documents on their mobile devices. For example, users can fill and sign contracts generated in AFP on their mobile devices, and these contracts can be easily integrated into the same production and distribution streams as if they had been created or altered in classical batch production environments.
Q: Can you explain to us what Enhanced Metadata is, and its importance to innovation in AFP?
Roberto: Well, Metadata was my and the Consortium’s top priority since day one. We recognized the importance of standardizing the way we handle document information that might not immediately be required for printing but could be useful later in handling and storage.
We live in a tightly connected world, with people of different generations, locations and abilities entering and being empowered in the workforce. Technology has been able to play a great role in levelling the playing field for many people who historically encountered barriers to entry. This is an exciting and positive development, and it is true to the open, collaborative spirit of the AFP Consortium. Metadata ties into all of this. Locale of origin and of viewing, intended sequence of paragraphs, and how information is structured in a document are all aspects of metadata, and understanding how those aspects enhance or impede consumption of information is crucial to accessibility.
Metadata tagging can be used to store basically any information you might need or want to keep tight to the document, no matter where the document travels in our connected world, from a cloud server in Dubai to a hard drive in Greenland. Metadata can aid communication and understanding in incredible ways.
Q: Beyond that, are there other potential AFP evolutions – either in the architecture itself, or in how it’s used – you anticipate in the coming years that you’re excited about?
Roberto: It’s very hard to predict the future. In recent years, demand for multiple-language documents including Asian alphabets has increased at incredible rates in Western countries. Adoption of AI and assistive technologies like voice recognition on mobile devices has significantly increased. I think we will see more of these types of evolutions in the future, and I'm excited to see AFP being part of this picture.
Q: Is there any one particular development in AFP or the AFP Consortium in the last few years that you are particularly proud of or excited about?
Roberto: There are so many. I still keep in my heart the very origins of the AFPC, I mean, back when it was the AFPCC, with the added “C” for Color. Full-color support was the first big enhancement, made possible by cooperation with IBM.
As a Board member, today I see strong synergies going on among the members of the Consortium. The ability to enrich AFP with logical structure has long been a goal for ISIS Papyrus, and the evolution of AFP in that manner has benefited not only my company, but many others and many users around the world. That’s something I'm really proud of.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Roberto: I'm happy to see a number of new participating and associate members have joined the Consortium in recent years.
To me, this is the best demonstration of the strength of AFP as an open standard, and of the good and hard work being done by our group. The Consortium, and its growth, is a tangible sign of how technology can promote a win-win scenario, even among competitors.
Q: Why do you feel the AFP Consortium is important to the print industry? Has your view of the role of the AFP Consortium changed in your time working with it?
Roberto: The AFP Consortium has been important to the print industry since its inception, but its role has evolved over the years. To break down that evolution, I'd like to focus on three periods: ten years ago, today, and five years in the future.
Ten years ago, the Consortium, by then already 5 years old, was reborn as an open standards body - an important step towards broadening the visibility of the architecture. The Consortium was a catalyst for collaboration among otherwise disparate sectors with, at times, divergent interests: the printing industry, the tools and converters industry, the paper-based enterprise communication platforms industry. The AFP Consortium turned these differing perspectives into an asset, bringing multiple perspectives together around a table to jointly participate in the evolution of the architecture. Our main objective has always been to grow the capabilities of AFP to meet user needs, irrespective of the channel – print, email, web presentment, or anything else.
Today, the result of such collaboration is clear: AFP has gained new functionality in many areas, ranging from graphics to color management, on up to the current moment, when strides are being made in the formalization of the logical document structure – that is to say, metadata.
Five years into the future, AFP will enter its 40th year in an even more connected world, where Universal Accessibility will be the norm. The groundwork the Consortium is laying today will be leveraged for increasingly sophisticated use cases, such as multi-language and distributed document composition workflows. I see the role of the Consortium as being central to guiding the architecture in these directions in the years to come.
Q: As the walls between different types of print continue to lower, and print operations increasingly look to incorporate broader capabilities, such as graphic arts to complement direct mail, do you think AFP has an opportunity to grow in new areas of print?
Roberto: AFP has a well-known, strong position in transactional and TransPromo print, as well as the overall Automated Document Factory (ADF) sector, thanks to its bi-directional communication protocol (IPDS). Gaining richer AFP functionality in the graphic arts certainly benefits the entire value chain. Of course, the Consortium’s work to define a new interchange set (IS/3) greatly helps these efforts, as does AFP/A (ISO 18565:2015), which guarantees that any compatible entity (including generators, converters, and printers) handle print files in accordance with that standard.
To aid continued growth in these areas, I would not be surprised to see the Consortium push on a further interchange set that includes the latest Enhanced Metadata.
Q: What would you say is AFP’s single greatest strength? Where do you think it could most improve?
Roberto: It is difficult to pinpoint a single “greatest” strength in AFP among features such as its performance, reliability and linearity. If I may speak technically, the ability to process pages in a single pass, without the need to “look ahead” for the ensuing data is a major advantage, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the AFP architecture. This allows users to process large documents while consuming moderate resources. This contributes to overall efficiency, and even environmental sustainability, by encouraging more efficient energy use.
As for future improvements, I will say AFP has an excellent track record for ensuring backwards compatibility with technology through the ages. But today, it seems communication technologies are evolving faster than ever before. For that reason, I’d like to see similar extensibility and modularity applied to adapting to new features as they hit the market. This would require and encourage an even higher level of coordination among printers, generators and transforms.
Q: What is the one thing about AFP that you think we should know that we likely don’t today?
Roberto: AFP is a hidden ingredient behind many customer communication services. The majority of credit card letters sent in the U.S. – and of insurance policies, contracts, phone bills, and bank statements worldwide – are generated from AFP. Most of large corporations’ communications originate in AFP before they are printed, archived, and converted into various formats for different communication channels.
Q: What industries do you see AFP being leveraged the most in today? Do you think this has changed in recent years? Do you think it will change in the near future? If so, how?
Roberto: It seems every year more and more businesses and industries leverage AFP as a core technology for their communication requirements, and there are still many more that don’t yet use AFP but could benefit from it. I believe that AFP has the right qualities to build new features to grow its user base and utility. For example, AFP’s future could include a central role in multi- and omni-channel strategies where chat and social apps are the front-line of business-to-customer communication. Today, each customer relationship represents more documents, more communication, than ever before, and many of those still rely on paper at some point in the process. Considering that not that long ago, many prognosticators were saying paper was on its last legs, this has come as something of a surprise. Indeed, today's communication assets rely more on adaptability than ever, across channels.
AFP is already seeing use in multi- and omni-channel operations. It is well-positioned to continue to be of use now and into the future.
Q: A couple of years ago, we asked you where you see AFP going in the next decade, and you mentioned stronger support for creating AFP documents and printing them from mobile devices. How would you characterize AFP’s evolution on that front?
Roberto: That happened! Looking back at it, mobile was an easy bet for me to make; it’s something we in the Consortium strongly support. Observing the speed at which mobile technology has evolved and spread, businesses have already begun adjusting their communication strategies.
Although front-end technologies, like mobile, move very fast, I would never argue communicators should make concessions on security or back-end stability; that’s why AFP continues to be a central component of today's communication operations, no matter the channel. This is also why keeping AFP up to date is so important. Today, the architecture incorporates adaptive processes where print and archiving tasks can be dynamically created by business users, and dynamically viewed by mobile users, without disrupting or adding many steps to the workflow. In modern business, these capabilities are a given. AFP’s core strengths, when paired with these mobile capabilities, make for very strong solutions.
There are AFP-based offerings on the market today that allow users to create and interact with AFP documents on their mobile devices. For example, users can fill and sign contracts generated in AFP on their mobile devices, and these contracts can be easily integrated into the same production and distribution streams as if they had been created or altered in classical batch production environments.
Q: Can you explain to us what Enhanced Metadata is, and its importance to innovation in AFP?
Roberto: Well, Metadata was my and the Consortium’s top priority since day one. We recognized the importance of standardizing the way we handle document information that might not immediately be required for printing but could be useful later in handling and storage.
We live in a tightly connected world, with people of different generations, locations and abilities entering and being empowered in the workforce. Technology has been able to play a great role in levelling the playing field for many people who historically encountered barriers to entry. This is an exciting and positive development, and it is true to the open, collaborative spirit of the AFP Consortium. Metadata ties into all of this. Locale of origin and of viewing, intended sequence of paragraphs, and how information is structured in a document are all aspects of metadata, and understanding how those aspects enhance or impede consumption of information is crucial to accessibility.
Metadata tagging can be used to store basically any information you might need or want to keep tight to the document, no matter where the document travels in our connected world, from a cloud server in Dubai to a hard drive in Greenland. Metadata can aid communication and understanding in incredible ways.
Q: Beyond that, are there other potential AFP evolutions – either in the architecture itself, or in how it’s used – you anticipate in the coming years that you’re excited about?
Roberto: It’s very hard to predict the future. In recent years, demand for multiple-language documents including Asian alphabets has increased at incredible rates in Western countries. Adoption of AI and assistive technologies like voice recognition on mobile devices has significantly increased. I think we will see more of these types of evolutions in the future, and I'm excited to see AFP being part of this picture.
Q: Is there any one particular development in AFP or the AFP Consortium in the last few years that you are particularly proud of or excited about?
Roberto: There are so many. I still keep in my heart the very origins of the AFPC, I mean, back when it was the AFPCC, with the added “C” for Color. Full-color support was the first big enhancement, made possible by cooperation with IBM.
As a Board member, today I see strong synergies going on among the members of the Consortium. The ability to enrich AFP with logical structure has long been a goal for ISIS Papyrus, and the evolution of AFP in that manner has benefited not only my company, but many others and many users around the world. That’s something I'm really proud of.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Roberto: I'm happy to see a number of new participating and associate members have joined the Consortium in recent years.
To me, this is the best demonstration of the strength of AFP as an open standard, and of the good and hard work being done by our group. The Consortium, and its growth, is a tangible sign of how technology can promote a win-win scenario, even among competitors.
