Interview: Dr. Jacob Aizikowitz, Lifetime Achievement Awardee

An American Printer Interview
By Andy & Julie Plata 
Co-CEOs 
American Printer and the OutputLinks Communications Group

Upon learning of Jacob Aizikowitz’s Lifetime Achievement recognition, we asked him to share his career highlights. Jacob’s perspectives on the evolution of XMPie and personalized digital print technology may enhance your variable print profits.

Julie: Thank you for sharing your perspectives with our readers

Jacob: While my education centered on technology – computer science – my career path was around this print-related industry. Once I graduated from the Technion in Israel with a computer science degree (1977), I started at Mini Systems, an innovative software house that provided the software for Scitex, an early leader in the print industry.

My work at Mini Systems was primarily computer science focused. However,  I became indirectly involved with print technology by developing a networked system that supported multiple workstations/servers/image editors. That system enabled Scitex to engage new customers, like Time Magazine and Gutenberg Hus, with innovative, networked publishing systems.

Andy: I understand that you originally wanted to pursue an academic career. How did that change?

Jacob: In 1983, partially influenced by a visit to the legendary Xerox PARC, I decided to return for graduate studies at Cornell University. As I approached my Ph.D. in 1989, the road was open for an academic career at Xerox PARC, another research lab, or an assistant professorship in another good university. But a phone call from the late Ephraim (Efi) Arazi asking me to join him in starting EFI changed everything. Efi was the leader of Scitex and a legend in Israeli high-tech. I could not refuse his offer, so my academic career ended before it even started.

Julie: Tell us about your EFI career.

Jacob: As EFI’s head of R&D from 1989 to 1992, I became familiar with the printing and graphic communications industry. We were a driving force in pushing the field of color management (we called it Color Portability). I got to know many of the leading players at Apple, Adobe, Aldus, Quark, Kodak, Xerox, HP, and Canon. I also became familiar with desktop publishing.

Through EFI’s vision of Color Portability, I internalized the revolutionary meaning of democratizing publishing. As a result, I understood the value proposition of giving creative control to document originators much better.

Our work at EFI impacted the growth of digital printing.

The most impactful was the Fiery Controller, which I guided during the early phases (later, leaving hardware and focusing on software). The Fiery was revolutionary. It transformed digital color copiers into digital color printers, which made digital color printing with excellent image and color qualities a reality. It dramatically pushed the availability of digital color printing at the departmental or SMB businesses. A central element in the Fiery was that it would connect to the desktop, using the LAN, like any other desktop printer. Appearing to the users as a regular desktop printer made printing on a Fiery-enabled copier/printer easy and possible for any desktop user.

Moreover, it allowed any application to print on a Fiery-enabled copier/printer, which certainly accelerated the adoption of color in desktop publishing. The h/w vendors never planned to introduce digital color printers parallel to digital color copiers. The “printers” phase was supposed to follow the “copiers” phase. However, Fiery, which allowed transforming a copier to be a printer, changed everything. It pushed these hardware vendors to accelerate their efforts to come to market with digital color printers (the early 1990s) and gave OEMs the confidence to go forward with digital color presses.

While other disciplines at EFI were impactful, they did not become commercial successes on their own. Still, through our efforts in developing and deploying Cachet – the innovative color editor -- and EfiColor – the EFI engine for color management, we augmented Fiery with an aura of color sophistication, which helped establish Fiery’s leadership. And we also interacted with the key players of desktop publishing. Through various strategic agreements, some of our innovations became part of Adobe’s leading desktop publishing software packages.

Family choices triggered moving back to Israel, where I was out of the industry at the IBM Haifa research center for a few years. But then, in 1996, I landed back in the industry at Scitex.

Julie: How did the return-to-Scitex experience affect XMPie’s development?

Jacob: There, I became intimately familiar with digital printing, especially digital color printing, and, related to it, the whole idea of variable data printing beyond transactional printing.

My Silicon Valley experience – technology trends, product ideas, product-market fit ideas, and the desktop publishing focus on the originators – helped reshape the Scitex (later Creo) controller. Together we made breakthrough innovations in h/w and s/w that resulted in a top-of-the-line controller, packaged in an office-class form factor, friendly to its user, and capable of driving the highly demanding next-generation – toner and inkjet -- digital color printers.

The decision to formalize all the requirements for the future flavor of variable data in a language – we named it VPS -- like PostScript, but for defining jobs of variable-data printing was a breakthrough. However, when combined with Darwin as a system allowing originators to create variable data documents on the desktop and software that took care of everything related to printing these documents, I would dare say that we disrupted variable data printing. We offered a way to do variable data printing by a broad market, away from the small group of professionals who were the experts and incumbent leaders of the variable data printing field. These experts initially looked at it with skepticism. However, no one could stop the momentum, primarily as computing h/w, networking, software, and print technologies evolved, making control-by-the-originators broadly practical, highly desired, and commercially viable.

Coming out with VPS was highly impactful. Internally, it provided clear scope and goals of the hardware developments needed for the controller – the best possible performance and quality in interpreting print streams encoded in VPS. Externally, it opened the door for collaborating with many outside players, offering them to emit VPS to drive any print engine that the Scitex (later Creo) controller would drive.

It led to my decision to launch XMPie and drive commercial-grade creative variability with cross-media personalization.

Julie: Can you elaborate more on what eventually led you to launch XMPie?

Jacob: I founded XMPie (together with Israel Roth and Reuven Sherwin) with the vision of bridging print and digital with cross-media personalization. However, a critical element of our vision and value was what, many years later, I called Modern VDP.

XMPie enabled online connection to actual databases and powerful scripting languages to drive variability. We added the concepts of networked production and composition servers for scalability even before the cloud computing days. When Adobe introduced InDesign Server, we enhanced InDesign's performance and scalability with our server-class solutions.

Julie: How does XMPie’s cross-media relate to digital media breakthroughs?

Jacob: Our print personalization software architecture allowed variability at the design object level and enabled rules that work directly with online connected databases rather than one table. These were critical to our digital media solutions.

Our architecture enabled print and digital technologies to share a common foundation of rules and data, which delivered novel cross-media consistency automation.

Before XMPie, the existing cross-media systems used each media's tools and methods for design, data, rules, and integration. As a result, heavy manual work and strict human coordination were mandatory for consistency across all media. Those manual processes were not only cumbersome, costly, prone to errors, and slow in terms of time to market. For example, one could change a rule that drives the print side while forgetting to change the digital side.

In summary, XMPie augmented the Creative Variability foundation established with Darwin and VPS with the At Scale dimensions. Our framework provided print and digital with a common foundation of rules and data, enabling the novel consistency-guaranteeing approach to cross-media. These fundamentals were expanded to support powerful APIs with the ability to link directly to databases. We also added Web2Print, Video Personalization, and email services to provide integrators tools for creating custom-made solutions.

Andy: As we close, please share how it felt to be recognized with Dr. Keith Davidson Xplor’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jacob: I am honored to accept this award. A bit embarrassed by its life summary flavor, but I hope to continue contributing to and following this industry. I am incredibly humbled to receive this award since the work my team and I did throughout my career focused on enabling creative, colorful, marketing-centric, and data-driven print, which was not the Xplor members’ mainstream. Xplor’s recognition of our contribution to the field and industry is genuinely moving and humbling. I believe that the massive digital transformation occurring in every industry forces Xplor and the print industry to adjust, transform, and blend disciplines. Such a transformation helps blend print with digital communications. It also helps integrate business and marketing communications, which may make the work my teams and I did highly relevant to Xplor’s future.

The reality is that at significant junctions, I had the opportunity to collaborate with great people from whom I learned a great deal, which impacted my career positively.

Most notably concerning this industry is the late Ephraim Arazi, whom I first met when I did Software for Scitex. Years later, he asked me to join him, this time with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell, as he founded EFI. At EFI and with Efi, I learned about the industry, the various players, intellectual property, and the magic balance between technology and business. For example, one of EFI’s visionary thrusts was to enable the originators – designers and authors – to use color and specify the desired colors naturally, letting technology automatically manage all the machine-specific, print-specific details. This vision echoed the fundamentals of desktop publishing but expanded to color. Not only did I practice it as I led EFI R&D, but it profoundly influenced my approach to the industry and affected everything I did after EFI, especially at XMPie.

Accepting such a humbling recognition from Xplor deserves comments on innovations, products, customers, markets, and interactions. I learned from Ephraim Arazi that asking customers what they want – especially what product they want – is not a good practice for high-tech products/services. Instead, one must be able to combine knowledge of technology, ability to innovate, and understanding of markets (which includes learning from customers or prospects) to bring meaningful breakthrough products to market. Once a product is in the market, intimate dialogues with customers are critical for defining further improvements, refinements, or derivatives. Although following this strategy is challenging, customers will thank you for bringing them what they needed but never knew to ask for it.

In closing

We appreciate your investment of time in reading this interview. Please let us know if you gained business enhancement ideas from the interview. And, please share ideas for future articles and interviews.

Focusing on the business side of print,
Andy & Julie Plata