Modern VDP – What, Why, How, and What’s Next

Jacob Aizikowitz, Ph.D.

Modernizing VDP, which started in the mid to late ’90s, transformed VDP into a print media that could deliver refined, creative, and unconstrained variability. The goal was to allow every part of every page – an image, text, charts, presentation style, and more – to vary from page to page. I use the term Modern VDP to refer to the result of this transformation.

Modern VDP was highly synergistic with the evolution of color digital printing. Its variability demanded the full range of capabilities of these color digital printers. However, Modern VDP’s impact was – and still is – far beyond supporting digital color printers. It linked modern Marketing and Customer Communications disciplines with printing, opening the door for print to be an equal citizen to digital media in Customer Experience Management.

I retired from XMPie in mid-2019, and it gave me time to reflect on what my team and I did for personalization and VDP. Eventually, this led to writing a paper on Modern VDP – what was driving the need to “invent” it and what were the innovations and technologies needed to make it happen.

This article is an extensive summary of that paper, and it should help the reader decide whether they want to dive deeper and explore the full paper.

Why MOdern VDP

When examining the evolution of Modern VDP, it is essential to understand that it challenged Legacy VDP, the incumbent VDP technology, which focused on supporting the variability needed in structured business documents, which was rigid and constrained. Such variability could not cover the free, unconstrained, and colorful variability that the emerging digital color presses enabled (from the mid to late ’90s onward).

Modern VDP changed all of that, and it was a revolutionary move, starting fresh, not incrementally evolving the Legacy VDP technology.

Opening New Markets and Transforming Print

As mentioned above, Modern VDP opened for print the large and fast-growing markets of Marketing Automation and Customer Experience Management (CXM). These markets expected the refined and unconstrained variability provided by digital media, and only Modern VDP could match that for print. Moreover, the object-level variability of Modern VDP made it possible to use data and rules for computing variability in practically identical ways to how variability was computed in digital media applications. This similarity enabled using print and digital holistically and consistently, strengthening Modern VDP’s relevance to these markets.

As a result, the print businesses that embraced Modern VDP and its approach to data and rules transformed their companies to the digital age. Being digital-savvy, they could stay relevant to their customers and grow their businesses, even when the general print business declined.

Implementing MOdern VDP – a Challenge

While the vision for Modern VDP was in perfect harmony with the emerging digital color printing technologies and the dynamic capabilities of digital media, implementing it was a significant challenge. First was the need to develop tools that would enable the originators – authors, designers, and creative professionals – to create documents with variability at the design-object level without restricting the type, location, dimension, or the number of variable design objects. The second was overcoming the computational challenges that supporting the refined and unconstrained variability of Modern VDP presented for Composition -- the generation of the VDP print streams -- and Interpretation -- the processing of such stream to generate printed pages.

Addressing these two challenges required (a) a solution that would mimic desktop publishing but for VDP and (b) innovations for optimizing the compute-intensive processes. The paper analyses these and covers the innovations and technology developments that addressed them and made Modern VDP a reality.

The closing section of the main part of the paper presents concurrent composition – harnessing a network of servers distributed computing style to collaborate on generating the print instructions for a variable data document. In presenting the solution, the paper examines alternative architectures and discusses their pros and cons. The paper then closes with a unique architecture that leverages Replication (to avoid process-coordination delays) and Gossiping –distributed computing techniques – to deliver an efficient and highly scalable implementation of concurrent composition.

A Glimpse into The Future

While the paper focuses on the evolution of Modern VDP, I added a What’s Next section where I highlight a few directions that Modern VDP enables today.

Harmony between Physical and Digital Touchpoints in a Customer Journey

While in the early days of founding XMPie, the notion of cross-media individualized communications appeared futuristic, these days, it has become a must. Numerous reasons are driving this; however, two are solid and indisputable.

1. Brands desire to individualize products’ external appearance – packages, labels, on-object print, and even garments (note: Individualization is not necessarily personalization; it might be mass versioning or mass customization)
2. Brands desire to view physical products beyond their product function; they view products as touch points in a customer experience journey

Given the digital-first nature of brands’ marketing thinking and the above two, one sees that customer journeys where print (through the physical product) and digital must play together are necessary.

And Modern VDP, through the type of variability it offers and its online data and rules model, is critical for enabling such winning customer experiences.

The Role of ML and AI

Another theme I brought up in that section is the impact of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). While I just scratched the surface with these in the paper, there is no doubt that ML and AI will have a profound and long-term impact on planning and implementing personalization and experiences. Those involved in planning the blueprints for such journeys know well that it’s a complex task, which becomes even more complicated when physical and digital touchpoints are part of the journey. Therefore, I believe that ML and AI will help remove the journey planning bottlenecks, which will help materialize the vision of brands engaging their audience through ongoing individualized experiences that span time and media.

A Concern about an Emerging Disconnect in the Data and Rules Models used by Print and Digital Media

I decided to close the What’s Next section, voicing concern about a re-emerging gap between the data and rules models used in print personalization with Modern VDP and digital media’s data and rules models. Although, until about five years ago, Modern VDP’s data and rules models were aligned with those used for digital media, I feel that the data and rules models of the digital media worlds are, yet again, drifting far away from those used in Modern VDP.

Background

Modernizing VDP was a central theme in my professional work since I rejoined Scitex to lead its R&D in Software and Hardware for Digital Printing (1996). Moreover, it became a central theme for me once I founded XMPie in late 1999, where together with my co-founders and our team, we developed XMPie to become a strong software brand in print and cross-media personalization. This leadership position exposed us to many customers, partners, and competitors, which triggered the refining and expansion of our vision. It also fostered partnerships with the stakeholders of this industry and ultimately helped make Modern VDP universally relevant and not just a characteristic of the XMPie software.

Why This Paper

The idea for the paper started once I retired from XMPie (mid-2019) and had the time to develop some perspective. One of the issues I reflected upon was a patent granted to XMPie early on (2000-2005), which included a section (and claims) about novel techniques for concurrent composition. I felt that taking the technology description out of a patent lingo would make it accessible beyond the boundaries of XMPie, opening it to the broad community of VDP software and hardware developers. Furthermore, given the abundance of cloud systems and the ease of providing massive scalability within such systems, the need for efficient architectures for massive concurrent composition is more acute today than in the past.

However, as I planned the paper, I realized that without a broad overview of VDP, such a paper would be relevant only to XMPie engineers. So, one thing led to the other, and I decided to write a paper that would describe the principles, innovations, and developments that created Modern VDP. And I knew that within that paper, I would be able to include sections about concurrent composition, which would help share the insights from the patents with the whole community of developers around VDP.