Mountains, Clouds, Collaboration and Zaikio. An interview with Karl Ciz

I recently spent some time talking with Karl Ciz from Zaikio for our FuturePrint Podcast. Karl is the Head of Partnership at Zaikio and I discovered more about the thinking behind the business and its goals and aspirations. Listen to the podcast here. 

Karl, what is your background and how did you get into print?

I come from an IT and technology background. I worked in the very early days of E-commerce and cloud with Sun Microsystems and then went on to work in a number of organizations that were disruptive in their nature. So I like bringing new technologies to market, which have made a very positive difference to everyone. And in some cases, those solutions are absolutely ubiquitous. So for example, for the Royal Mail (In the UK) we developed a solution, which is now used by literally everybody in the country who sends parcels or posts. Stamps now represent only 10% of all posted letters now as we were the very first to introduce QR codes on any sort of parcels. So anyone who posts anything will see the benefits of my work, every time they send a parcel! Disruption is technology-led in any industry, and this time I’m hoping to bring some real disruptive value to the print industry.

So you have a technical and software background. And helped Royal Mail with QR codes enabling mail to be sent, processed and delivered using special QR code Apps. Is that right?

That's right, yes. So with any process, the art of digitalization and digitization is to take what are essentially human processes and make them more efficient by incorporating some sort of technological solution, which will enhance the service which you aim to provide. So yes our app revolutionized how parcels are sent and have made it more efficient for everyone. 

So this is a positive disruption, is this a theme for Zaikio too? Tell us more about the background? How did it come about? And what are the core products?

I first came across Zaikio when it was still a company called Crispy Mountain and they had a rather interesting cloud-based MIS that was unique. So I decided to take a closer look. And in those discussions, at the time I was with United Print selling Web2print, and I was looking for clever solutions in the market to improve our performance, but there was very little around until I had a very interesting conversation with the owner of Crispy Mountain, who was at that stage, talking with Heidelberg about a grander concept than just an MIS. The concept was of a platform, which would universally connect to everybody, whether they be MIS solutions, machine manufacturers, workflow solutions or web to print which had some unique and powerful performance. I got interested in it, so much so that I took the decision to join Zaikio because the idea behind the platform was going to be completely universal and would standardise many things. 

What were the advantages for printers and ISVs?

There were standards out there that were introduced a long time ago. JDF is one of those standards that did not become universally adopted, as the idea was adopted but in an individual way by each of the manufacturers. So, for example, they became JDF for HP or JDF for Heidelberg, and so on. What Zaikio presented was an overlap really, with JDF. And we still use standards that exist. But we do that in a more modern way. 

So that overlap then extends into a proper product, a product that's cloud-based and it's fully online for everyone and inclusive. There is no need for on-site servers, there is no difficulty in knitting systems together because they already talk the same language. So conceptually, it is similar to JDF. But that's about it, in reality, we have a practical, real-world product that will allow customers to connect simply.

The advantage of this is there can be no mismatch, everybody talks the same language so that data flows universally and easily from system to system.  Printers will be able to connect suppliers, software, and machines up all in one single sign-on environment and save loads of money in the process!

You have used the following phrase in the past to describe Zaikio as the interoperability layer. Does Zaikio remove some of the more mundane tasks for people?

Actually, the opposite is true, really, it is the very complex human tasks that this removes. OK, so a traditional print shop is perfectly able to work with one piece of technology or another in isolation. The problem comes when it tries to combine technologies or wishes to work with more than one vendor or supplier. The proprietary nature of software solutions and many hardware solutions means that it's very, very difficult to knit together an entire solution unless you start paying big money for integration costs. And, Integration costs are something that smaller businesses will invariably struggle to afford while larger businesses probably find it difficult to justify paying for something that's so heavily bespoke that it takes away a lot of their margin over time. So yes, we're in a position whereby I think we'll help both the printer and indeed, software vendors and suppliers to the market by reducing complexity and, ultimately, cost.

Your role within Zaikio is head of partnerships. So does Zaikio really benefit printers and software companies?

Yes, it is a win-win-win situation really. From an ISV perspective, (independent software vendor)  or a supplier to the market, to anybody who runs a print shop. All of the supply chain struggles with the connection scenario, right? Will my MIS work with this? Or will my workflow solution or my web principles work with this? Will machines work with this, will it be able to work with those solutions that sit around it? So yes, Zaikio simplifies that whole piece down for the ISP because this doesn't need to integrate with 100 customers, or 500 customers, or whatever, you know, it is a global scenario with many millions of customers. So he just needs to integrate once which is simple and powerful.

So it enables the entire industry to benefit from the use of the cloud?

Yes, it results in a huge cost-saving. For printers and suppliers, it simplifies complexity and increases user uptake of those solutions, because gone are the days when you would need a high end and complex integration solution or consultancy. Interestingly, a lot of software solutions will have spent a lot of money on creating the first of their cloud architectures. But those cloud architectures are only really designed for their own software. They're not really working in a highly connected cloud environment. And that's what we're offering, we are offering printing on a highly connected cloud environment that each of the vendors (and their clouds) can sit within. It is a complete win for the printer, and a complete win and the suppliers to the marketplace!

Is this vision unique to Zaikio?

Yes. Many will know that Zaikio is owned by Heidelberg. But regardless, we have a truly pragmatic approach to the market. We want to work with everybody. We actually see all of Heidelberg’s OEM competitors as partners. And we welcome some of those cloud architectures that are springing up, to be a cloud within a cloud, right? So to make those clouds interoperable with all the cloud systems, we're not competing with any single one of those architectures, we're actually offering to give them much wider interoperability and connectivity.

This, in essence, will make the industry more efficient, and more connected and the community in its entirety will have a better understanding of how to manage resources. Let's be honest, the pandemic has caused a supply chain crisis and it is no surprise that print is affected. I guess this is something that we can not alleviate, but this does provide people with the data and information they need to be able to manage their resources more effectively.

Knowledge is power, this we all know. So because the data flows more easily through an organisation, the smoother it is, and therefore the more efficient it is. The pandemic has highlighted certain things, not least that we have to be adaptable. We have already started to pivot and change our software according to the problems that the pandemic has created. So I mean, I can give you a product parameter - we initially created a procurement solution. Zaikio connects suppliers, with their printers and printers with their suppliers to essentially get the price from the supplier without having to pick up the phone or write an email and take up valuable time on both sides of the fence. 

We started this in Germany, about four or five months ago and we've got massive uptake of the solution. And in fact, we've had a sort of pre-launch in the UK and had a good number of customers sign up. But the feedback soon enough turned into yes, this is great, our MIS can consume that price. Our calculation engine is better for us in terms of what we can deliver to the customer for accuracy of price and accuracy of delivery. But the delivery piece was something that we hadn't really accounted for, the standard market condition in paper supply and substrate supply in general, was always the next day, or as close to the next day as possible. The supply chain has changed slightly in the last six months. And all of a sudden, the requirement wasn't just a price, all of a sudden, people were really concerned about the delivery of their product and getting a relatively accurate delivery date. So we changed the software, and we changed the procurement product to now include price and availability on every single request. So a client or their end is connected and can request the price for the calculation, but can also be very, very accurate in terms of when that paper is available. This is absolutely key in running a business. And we didn't consider that at the start, we always assumed that the next day as standard. So yes, that pandemic has changed an awful lot for an awful lot of people. That's just our particular example. But we believe that the pandemic accelerated the discussion about the digitalization of individual tasks and we believe the future of print has to be connected, it has to be collaborative.

Zaikio is a highly collaborative organization, and we hate the fighting that goes on in the world, we would much rather sit down and be friends with everybody. We are not threatening anybody's commercial viability here. Anyone out there who wants to join the platform is enhanced by working together with a platform like ours. I would suggest for most ISVs, and most printers it would be an absolute win-win situation. And I think taking some of the commercial sides out of it for those big, big organizations realizing we're not a threat, and we want their clouds in our cloud, we want those clouds to be interoperable with other clouds. So our vision is to take away that ‘stacked mentality’, and that propriety mentality from the business and start getting people to work together for the good of the printer.

So the future is collaboration, not competition?

Yes, don't get me wrong. There's a commercial model behind our solution as well. But it's never the printer that pays for that. The model has to be collaborative and it has to be beneficial to the printer. Clearly, there's a cost to running a platform like ours, so we need some models behind it. And you know, with procurement we have a commercial model. Suppliers pay us a very tiny slim percentage. And then you know, the winner really is the printer and from suppliers' perspective, they win by taking fewer phone calls, fewer customer service calls and fewer inquiries about price and availability.  But potentially processing more transactions. And that suits everybody. It's more efficient.

So reducing basic transactions makes things more efficient?

Well absolutely. From a printer's perspective, you imagine from a supplier's perspective, that's multiplied by 500, or 1,000? And, from our perspective, if there's a win for everybody in this scenario, we're happy as our entire vision is to do this for the benefit of this industry. But we've seen that this solution could actually fit into other industries as well.

Once you start hooking people up with equivalent data, everybody can transact more easily. It doesn't need to be a situation where everybody's competing, it needs to be a situation where everybody needs to make their own amount of money out of a particular deal. I'm sure that's always going to be the case. And I'm sure to a certain extent, JDF consultants out there will still have their piece to do when it comes to the more complex and bespoke integrations. But realistically, the entire industry will benefit. If the big manufacturers all opened up their minds just that little bit and realized this is not about competing and instead let's do something that's altruistic for the good of the entire print business, and for the good of printers. 

So it's about working smarter, as opposed to harder. Would that be right?

It is! Yes, very much. Let’s face it, we all live in 2022, not in 1995. And a lot of the solutions that have been out there for 20 years, we no longer need servers on-site. Because communication, the adoption of broadband and the reliability of those connections was, well, let's face it was a bit dodgy, wasn't it? 20 years ago! Here we are in 2022 and my internet's not gone down for 16 weeks, and even then it only went down for seven minutes. Most businesses are perfectly able to have a good broadband connection. And indeed, the way to prevent any sort of disaster is to just have a double connection, right? So if one router goes down, it clicks to the next. It's dead simple. And that's the only connectivity you need. You don't need big servers anymore. We know we no longer go shopping, we go to a platform. All our banking is done online, and so on. So why shouldn't your business be run in the same way? You've got the tools at your disposal? Why are you not using them?

The answer is that nobody's done it. So what you say is that we are. Lots of people have a cloud mentality. But they do that within their own proprietary stack.

With the word, ‘Stack’ does this mean they've designed something specific to them? Yeah. And does it really work for them?

Yes, it works online. But it's not really a cloud solution. Because a proper cloud solution is one instance of software that serves everybody. Like Salesforce, there are lots of examples.

We use cloud software. It's brilliant and enables you to do things as you said, it's just fantastic what you can achieve with it, which five years ago wouldn't have been possible, but it does mean actually doing something about it and learning something. 

So if somebody was approaching you, and they wanted to be a partner, how do they contact you? And what kind of process is in place for somebody who's interested in finding out more?

My email address is kc@zaikio.com. Or you can drop us a request through the website. If you're an ISV, you can get in touch with us if you're a printer and you want some advice. But to sign up for the solution for the printer is really easy. All you need to do is go to Zaikio.com and sign up for an account there.