Agfa Graphics achieved a world’s first when it brought the prepress activities for the two largest Belgian newspaper groups in the cloud. Coldset Printing Partners (CPP) originated in 2010 as the joint-venture of the Belgian cold set printers of Belgium’s largest media groups Corelio and Concentra. It is the largest newspaper printer in Belgium. To build out a central control center for both printing sites CPP turned to Agfa Graphics.

The project, encompassing the set-up of a ‘virtual print center’ by Agfa, started in 2012. In March 2013 all requirements were considered to be fulfilled and the project was delivered. The Arkitex software was installed on Agfa’s IT infrastructure and hosted in its secure data centers. These data centers are connected to the printing sites without interruption. All data transferred by the newsrooms end up on Agfa's servers. In the data centers these data are made print-ready before they are sent to the newspaper printing sites.

"When the team of Agfa proposed to manage all prepress activities in the cloud, we thought that they had lost their minds," said Tony Nouwen, Graphic expert for system-, color - and quality management at Concentra Media. "Now that we see how our operations are even faster, more smooth and more efficient at even higher production volumes, we can rightly state that this is the cleverest job that Agfa has done for us in our twenty-five years of being a loyal customer."

Today the result is a far-reaching application of private cloud hosting. It makes CPP the first newspaper group in the world to have its prepress operations fully in the cloud. For them the change means shorter intervention times, since Agfa Graphics can now directly work on their servers. Thanks to the continuous monitoring the stability of the systems improved too. Furthermore, the switch resulted in significant savings, because CPP doesn’t need to make expensive investments in infrastructure and software, nor in maintenance of in-house servers.

Agfa Graphics offers the complete project as a paid service to CPP. The CMTPS (Cloud, Managed and Technical Professional Services) team offers a service for the infrastructure of the servers, networks and data centers. They operate the complete systems for the prepress activities of the CPP printing sites 24/7 so that possible problems are avoided or can be immediately solved.

The choice for Agfa was well-considered. Corelio and Concentra had been using Agfa Graphics’ prepress systems for almost 25 years already, including workflow software. They were thus very much aware of Agfa’s expertise and knowhow in the field of newspaper printing. In addition, Agfa could show a lot of experience with cloud hosting in the health care sector. Hospitals are outstanding examples of environments that require highly secure handling of confidential data, which is equally important to newspapers. Furthermore, speed and flexibility are also of key importance.