It’s a Wrap: Thoughts and Insights from #SolimarUC19

The first week of May 2019 has marked putting another Solimar User Conference and Customer Advisory Council (CAC) meeting in the books (2019 conference agenda & events). If you aren’t familiar with the conference or the advisory meeting, it is something our team has put together for many years now. In fact, you may even read our 2018 and 2017 recap to get a flavor of where we have come from in the last year. You will also find our social activity archived via #SolimarUC19 on Twitter and LinkedIn (give us a follow on both!).

Why does this theme matter? As our attendees of both the CAC meeting and the user conference found out, Chemistry isn’t just the name of our solutions platform…it is also the process by which we approach the market, build customer relationships and experiences and drive innovation for the print and communications industries. We say “Evolved” because we are bringing a number of new things to our user base and the market in general. Capabilities that we believe will dramatically change how our clients are able to manage their print and digital delivery production processes. Or their workflow, if you will.

Before we get to the highlights of the conference, we would like to take a moment to share insights from our Customer Advisory Council (CAC) meeting. Of our complete membership, we were delighted to welcome nearly 20 members that were able to attend the meeting and conference in person. We shared with them insights from industry analyst Pat McGrew, Keypoint Intelligence, and Inkjet maven Elizabeth Gooding, President of Inkjet Insight. And they shared too; helping us understand the state of their production volume, whether they have adopted a platform for their print and digital production and delivery, the number of “lanes” they print in (transactional, direct mail, books, etc.) and more.

The CAC is an important part of how Solimar keeps our finger on the real issues impacting organizations today in the print and digital communications production and delivery landscape. Our team cannot thank the participants and their organizations enough for allowing the time to be spent away from the office to facilitate learning, insight and, ultimately, the evolution of helpful solutions.

We should also mention that in parallel to the CAC meeting, we invited users of Solimar software to attend a full-day of hands-on training. Complete with individual laptops and virtual environments so that attendees could not only learn, but try what they learn in real-time, the training day has become of significant value in our conference program. This year we maxed out our capacity and look forward to providing the same experience to even more users next year.

This leads us to the 2019 Solimar User Conference; an event that spanned two days by itself with opportunities to engage in both Executive and Technical break out sessions. And we had some fun too with an evening adventure to a hip new bowling spot in the heart of the Gas Lamp District. The magic of a relaxed evening event is that you can really get to know people and have some fun competition.

The conference focused on the Evolution theme this year; a theme we made good on by showing our attendees our new Graphic User Interface updates to components of Chemistry such as our document reengineering and enhancement product, Rubika. The updates were designed with the user in mind in order to make it easier to train new users and complete tasks in less time, clicks and effort. In addition, we also have improvements to our print management solution, Solimar Print Director Enterprise (SPDE) or Speedy as one of our clients has nicknamed it. It is also a good reminder that Solimar is the post-composition vendor that has the experience and technology to drive multi-vendor production print floors; with the added value of having the openness of being able to integrate with existing solutions so you are in control of what you rip and replace…if anything.

We also heard from Solimar Systems President and CEO, Drew Sprague, on “Reading the Tea Leaves” for the future direction of the industry. Some advice he shared with our attendees included these wise thoughts:

• Hedge your bets
• Measure twice, cut once
• You can do it, but you don’t have to do it all on your own
• Skate with your head up!
• Don’t forget Mother’s Day!

We invite you to login to Solimar University Online (SUO) to review his full presentation, insights and calls to action.

For many, the main attraction was the presentation and demonstration of our PDF optimization solution. It is no secret in the industry that composition systems and post-composition tool sets are both notorious for creating different levels of PDF output quality. Our latest innovation in PDF optimization is the first of several releases from Solimar that aims to give print and digital production houses the control they need. Printers not running at rated speed due to the printer chewing on the PDF file too long? We would love a chance to help you solve that with our latest technology due out for General Availability -(GA) in July. Conference attendees got a first-hand look and we loved their candid feedback.

It just wouldn’t be possible to cover everything in this recap that we achieved with our attendees over several days, but we were humbled by the great turn out and are gathering feedback to make the 2020 conference even better. We also must specifically thank our keynote speakers, Pat McGrew of Keypoint Intelligence, Elizabeth Gooding of Inkjet Insights and Tim Cooper of NCP Solutions, an OSG Company. Plus, we had presentations from our partners that truly made our clients and users think about the marketplace; we thank everyone, including our clients who presented to the attendees, for their time, insight and participation.

Until next year, we will continue to gather data from our attendees and start to plan out next year’s conference in 2020. If you missed 2019, make sure you mark your calendar for the April/May time frame so you can engage with this amazing group of people. Cheers!

Want to learn more? Reach out to the Solimar Team right here via our website. We look forward to speaking with you soon.