Okay, the long-awaited Chapter 11 filing of Kodak happened yesterday.

As us tech dwebs know (and it seems sometimes that only us tech dwebs know this) it's relatively simple -- as time goes by -- to replace: consumables, digitial printing, equipment, and even ctp devices.

But database-centric prepress systems? Maybe not so easy.

So with Kodak heading down, down, to Chapter 11 and possibly liquidation in the sometime future, what is going to happen to the prepress system that is driving the majority of the world's offset printers' workflow?

Well, notso easy to figure out. First of all, from what I know, the various Prinergy teams are based in Vancouver (a shadow of its former self), Herzlia, Israel (staffing numbers unknown) and some parts of Asia (I heard Vietnam but what do I know? Probably wrong.)

There are former Prinergy developers working in Vancouver with most of the software development management team over at Copperleaf, with the notable exception of Dave Kauffman who is working with Tantalus.

As it stands now, I can't see any of them jumping back into the Prinergy fold to save it, as the heavy hand of Rochester is still gently guiding the product lineup of the old Creo gently down the flusher. Perhaps if the software division gets spun off, some might be persuaded to have a sniff as consultants. Of course, the code base of Prinergy now resides in Israel, so not so easy to figure out the communication issues around THAT issue.

Interesting to see, the irresistible force of Kodak mismanagement against the immovable object of the Oracle database of Prinergy that is at the heart of so many prepress systems across the world.

Interesting to watch as an observer. Not so interesting if you are participant in the drama.

David Kauffman's last day at Kodak is this Friday.

Right, I'm a bit late with this sorry. The last few days I have been struggling to deliver an e-commerce backend to a client, to replace a backend that was an affront and insult to webmasters the world over. I have a standard rule of thumb: If the code is so lousy that I can do a better job rewriting and replacing it myself, then the code was truly crap. Developers who have worked with me in the past would agree with this assertion.

Anyways, that reminds of a joke that a senior project manager told me when I was a very junior project manager:  What's the only sure-fire way to make software developers write code quicker? Answer:  Offer to assist them in writing the code. But on to the topic at hand:

So in my last couple of posts I made a bunch of assertions about Prinergy, and a fair number of people responded challenging my assertions.  A short list would include the following statements:

1.  Modern software projects are portable enough that the transfer of the Prinergy code base to Israel is achievable and not even controversial.

2. It is insanity for Kodak to kill off their crown jewel, so why would they do so?

3. Prinergy customers won't switch because there is nothing else to switch to.

4.  The team in Israel already has experience with the code base, so it's not like they are taking ownership of an unknown product.

Okay, all these assertions should be taken seriously. But let's look at what happened in context, let's take about three or six or ten steps back and look at the whole big picture.

1. Kodak has had a crappy year.

2. Kodak had a crappy last quarter (60% down in sales)

3. Cash is burning up.

4. Stream inkjet is suppose to save Kodak's bacon.

5. However Stream is in beta and Kodak can't recognize revenue or ship in signficant quantities unless Stream is in early production.

Okay, keeping all that stuff in your head, let us pose two questions:

1. How important is it to Kodak to have Prinergy development in a ready-state, that is able to fix bugs, merge new features and issues service and even minor revisions.

2. What is the linkage between Stream and Prinergy?

3.  When will the Prinergy development team in Israel get to ready-state?

Okay, so in my opinion (and oh how I enjoy writing that phrase "in my opinion" on my own frickin' blog as no one can veto my opinion HERE MMMHHHAAAAA,  HHHHHAAA <- Evil laugh) the answers are:

1. It's really important. More important than whatever cost savings were achieved this quarter by canning the Burnaby development team.

2. Linkage between Prinergy and Stream is significant and discoveries made in the beta program of Stream will necessitate changes upstream (in Prinergy). Yeah, yeah, the story is that they have compartmentalized the two products by creating a connectivity team between Prinergy and Stream. Oh, jolly well done.

Hey why don't we ask a former ex-project manager of Creo about connectivity teams that span continents? Why, that would be me.

No, no you say, maybe we ask the opinion of a project manager who has been to both Vancouver and Israel, and as an added bonus worked on output device connectivity between Prinergy and output devices designed and built in Israel.

Why, what an amazing coincidence, if I check my resume I see that I was the project manager for the CS Xpose program from about 2001 to 2004. CS Xpose was the application used to connect Prinergy to the Lotem Quantum. I worked with a bunch of guys over at Herzliya, although I won't embarrass any of them by naming names.

Listen, saying you got a connectivity team doesn't mean everything is going to run smoothly, especially if it's chaos on at least one side of the programme.

By the way, you guys are running Firewire or USB to the Stream, right? The data connection to the Lotem was SCSI when I was the PM, and it was always driving me crazy that it was SCSI.

3. When will Israel get ready-state? And the answer is, off the top of my head. Two quarters. Oh sure, if they go into crisis-mode (And they can be pretty good at producing in crisis mode. Probably because they are surrounded by Arabs who want to kill them all) they can release a service pack in the spring. A real limited service pack. But I don't think that group will start having aha moments about the code base until the summer. Now don't get commenting on my blog about me disrespecting the Israelis. I can remember years ago when every now and then a key developer would leave Burnaby and then right away, code fixes could easily slip weeks or months. So I'm being generous here.

Will Israel get ready-state in time to close off the Stream beta? If they don't, how will that affect the revenue numbers for Kodak in early 2010? I don't know, but I do have memories of my PM stint on the Xpose project. I do remember taking calls from the president (that would Judi Hess) when it got close to the end of the quarter saying they would miss revenue targets by $5 million unless I got Xpose out of beta tout-suite. And that Amos, who liked facing the financial analyst about as much as taking acid baths, would not be happy at having to explain where he lost $5 million.

Now contrast the situation that I faced in 2002 with what is going on now. I would say the stakes have been raised ten-fold. And the hurdles?

Gees, you've got to be kidding. You guys are getting upset because I'm saying Prinergy is dead. I've got guys emailing me that Kodak is on the verge of a bright and glorious future in commercial inkjet. But what I see is a company bleeding so bad it's amputating limbs to keep the trunk and head alive just a weeee bit longer.

Kodak pulls out of this, it will be the greatest comeback in American business history. Don't hold your breath.

Updated Tuesday morning based upon comment from Prinergy developers

Okay, if you have been following the story about layoffs at the Kodak Burnaby locations, you will know that 1) This blog is saying that significant development on the Prinergy workflow software is all but halted - that Prinergy is dead and 2) Officially, Kodak disputes this allegation, stating that Prinergy development will continue in Israel.
It is known that a transition team from Israel is scheduled to do an immediate two-week visit to the west coast of Canada for knowledge transfer. And not everybody is being laid-off: There will a remnant (about 10) of the Prinergy development team left in place to handle ongoing transition issues.
However, despite assuming that the "new" team are competent software developers (a safe assumption, in my experience, if you have to generalize, Israeli developers are usually quite competent), they will fail. They will fail because of the ten nine reasons listed. And it won't be their fault, it's just that the odds are insurmountable.

1. Merge, merge, where's the code base and who gets to merge?

When a group of software developers get together and write a bunch of code, there is a need for a software application that takes of care of the problem of version control. There is not one Prinegy version. There is Prinergy 5, there is version 4, there is Prinergy for packaging, there is Evo which Prinergy without the database. All of these version of Prinergy share some but not all of the massive code base which stored and maintained by a program called Perforce
Now let's say the Isreali team has Perforce experience and Perforce licenses. Even if they don't that's sorta okay because the licenses are cheap and Perforce is pretty easy to use. Prinergy used to be store and configured by a program called Clearcase, which wasn't nearly as user-friendly. So they dodged a bullet there. But here comes another one: Where are you going to keep the Prinergy code base? If you put in Israeli, then zero coding can be done by any of the remnant development team in Vancouver. Leave in Vancouver, and how the heck is Israel going to get hands-on experience with the Prinergy code? The solution is to have a transcontinental set-up of |Perforce able to accept code merges from either city. This is possible but non-trivial.

2. Prinergy Component: The Workshop (Client)

This should be easy. I mean this is just a Java client, right? Get a guy who knows some java, and can modify a GUI without making it too ugly, and we're done. Oh wait, does the coder know CORBA? That's the middleware between the client and the server. Oh hopefully, you have a guy who knows that. And whataminute, what about those caching tricks coded in the client to hide latency issues in communicating with the server? Hmmm...not such a cakewalk now, is it.

3. Prinergy Components: The Trapper

Everybody knows what trapping is, right? It's the overlapping of colors so that you don't have a thin white line between colours if the plates don't align perfectly on the press. Prinergy has a vector trapping. Guess how long it took to code the trapping engine. It took a team of 3 guys 2 years plus. Now was that three-man team made up of one journeyman developer and two college students? No, guess again. Try Ph.d's. In math.
What, you guys have two weeks to learn how to maintain and upgrade the trapping engine? Oh my.

4. What's the Big Deal About Flexo Anyways

So, there is this variation of Prinergy called Powerpack. Yeah, yeah, you see there are these printers who do something called flexo. Yeah, it's really weird. Don't say pages, say 1-ups. Oh and don't say impositions, say step-and-repeat. Trust me on this. By the way, whatever you do, don't tell them that you can't make head or tails of the trapping engine. PRETEND EVERYTHING IS FINE. Believe me when I say the flexo guys are really sensitive about trapping. BTW, the step-and-repeat work is done in a program called Pandora. Fortunately, Pandora is owned by Kodak. Unfortunately the coders are based in Shanghai. Um, do any of you guys speak Chinese?

Number #5 is deleted according to feedback in comments from a Prinergy developer. Python is not in the architecture of RBA

5. Python is not just a big scary snake

Prinergy has some neat little automation hooks called RBA which stands for rules-based-architecture or really-badass-automation or something like that. I forget. Anyways, it's allow you to automate many functions of the Prinergy system. It's written in Python. You got guys who know Python? You don't? Uh-oh. Oh well, let's forget about updating the RBA libraries or making patches. Wait, some of Kodak's biggest customers are in love with RBA. Time to break out the tutorials.

6. You put a database in there?

Oracle version 10 is at the core of Prinergy 5. You have an Oracle wizard, don't you? No? Well you have a guy who knows SQL, right? Do you or don't you? Sooo, suppose you have performance programs and you can't figure out if it's the workshop (you pray that it is) or an SQL script. Let me tell you something: Somewhere in Germany there is a Prinergy site that runs SIX VLF platesetters, day in, day out. What ever you do, don't let Prinergy run slow. Ever.

Okay, those are six reasons. But those were the easy ones. Mere programming hurdles. And with a little bit of knowledge and time, they can be surmounted.
Oh wait, let's talk about time. A logistical factor which is not working for you right now, to say it diplomatically. Let's look at time constraints.

7.Two weeks in, four weeks left

So you're in Vancouver and you're talking to a guy and you realize he has critical knowledge in head. But you don't have the right guy in place to suck the critical knowledge out. How much time do you have? Well, if you are lucking, you got three months. If not, you got four weeks. There are three groups of developers at Burnaby right now: Guys leaving in 4 weeks, guys leaving in 3 months and the pathetically small remnant. Now everybody will help you up to the very last day of their employment because of professionalism and let's face it, because of pity. But they are not going to tell you the questions you should be asking. You'll figure the right questions to ask eventually. But will you figure it out in 4 weeks?

8.Bonus, bonus, where's the bonus?

Unless I have heard incorrectly, the guys who have been given 3 months notice haven't been told their what their severance packages will be. Is this sneaky? You bet it is, because under Canadian law, working notice is the same as giving out severance pay. Do you follow? Okay, let me try again. It's safe to assume the 3 months guys aren't getting a bonus. And they haven't been promised a package. But they have been given notice. In Canada, an employee in good standing is entitled to anywhere from 3 months to 2 years working notice or severance pay. For example, let's say upon consultation with the lawyer who takes into account a multitude of factors, the employee named Fred Biznak is entitled to 4 months notice. That means that the company can either give Fred four months severance pay or tell him in 4 months, he is toast. In the eyes of the law, both are the same. Of course, in the eyes of Fred, one is a reasonably sweet deal, the other is a monstrous shaft.
The three-monthers at Kodak, how do you think the morale is? More importantly, are they even going to bother to stick around for 90 days?

9.This Stream inkjet thingie, is it important to Kodak?

So these new-fangled inkjet presses, they will have Prinergy in front of them? These presses are in beta? What is the schedule for these puppies to go into full production and make some coin for Kodak?
Well, let's all get together down on our knees and pray that none of the Stream installations find any problems with Prinergy because you are not going to see any service packs released for months, maybe even a couple of quarters. Can Kodak handle any delay on getting the Stream inkjet to market. Let's look at the numbers. No.

10.What about Victoria?

The team doing Prinergy Insite got canned too. Is anybody flying up to south part of Vancouver Island to ask that team about the web front-end of Prinergy. Holy Moses, has anybody even phoned the number of the Vic office just to see if anybody is still there to pick up the phone?

But the scariest question of all is why? Why did Kodak do this? Maybe after all the smoke blows away, they can see cost savings of about $10 million a year. But what will it cost the company if the Stream project is delayed to market by one or two months or even a quarter? How many customers will delay buying systems until they are assured that Prinergy is in the hands of a software team that knows the code base inside and out? Did Kodak really think they could whack 90% of the Prinergy development team and shrug it off saying "Just a routine shift of personnel. Nothing to see here. Move along now."

So many questions. No good answers.

I have just received a phone call from a Kodak employee. This morning Kodak served notice to virtually everybody who works in the Willingdon building of Kodak. That's the building that houses the Prinergy development team.
Everybody is being laid of, save for a small remnant. At its peak, there were more than 200 developers who worked on the Prinergy workflow. I'm pretty sure there were more than 100 hundred (update: 100 staff reductions worldwide, definitely fewer than 100 who got laid off in Burnaby) who got served notice today.
Officially, the story is that development will be moved to Israel. However, I doubt they have the staff to handle the migration of such a complex piece of software. I mean, unless they have about five or six dozen developers twiddling their thumbs.
In Burnaby, British Columbia, the plan is to leave a skeleton staff for business strategy and device connectivity. No more than a dozen people.
More details to follow, but at first glance this is a shocking dismemberment. Usually, to mothball a piece of software as large and complex as Prinergy takes about a year or even two. But it looks like Kodak plans on doing it in a matter of months.
Oh my God, this is going to be such a mess....

Update Thursday evening November 6th
The rumour that everybody is being laid off in Vancouver in two weeks time is false. There are two groups. One group is to be laid off by the end of November. The second group will be staying on for three months to help with knowledge transfer.
Next week a group from Israel will be arriving for knowledge transfer and be sticking around for two weeks. That's the origin of the two week rumour.

About 10 developers (coders and testers) and 10 "other" staff (product managers, subject matter experts, and project managers) will stay on in a "consulting" role.

Confirmation that product management and marketing is staying in YVR.

In Israel, the PODS team was cut and KEMS was cancelled. Many believe that the remnants of the KEMS team will be called to take over Vancouver's products.

Worldwide, the net reductions are approximately 100 staff.

An interesting note: Apparently the 3-month staff haven't been told what their severance packages will be and this is causing some "concern."

So I was doing some cruising over the other side of the Atlantic, checking out the latest news from Printweek. (By the way, it looks like the Communists are in trouble again. Good. I hate commies. But when did they ever care about profit?)

I checked out the product reviews and low and behold, we have something new from the workflow software group: Kodak  Insite Campaign Manager.

The best, short way to describe this product is that it help a printer transition from just providing print services to providing marketing services as well. Here are some quotes I ripped off borrowed from Printweek's article:

"Insite Campaign Manager (ICM) does everything: data, e-blasts, PURLs (personalised URLs) and print," says Kodak Insite Campaign Manager business development manager Serge Grichmanoff.

"This shows where we are heading as a company," adds Kodak enterprise solutions marketing director Matthieu Bossan. "Our future is in software and in marketing workflow, as we see our customers evolving into MSPs. For our customers, it's about thinking about where it is they want their businesses to go. Some are very prepared; others know they need to do something.

Pretty funny that I had to grab this news from an European publication when the Insite development is based in Victoria, BC, or just a ferry from where I live. Anyhow, I would really try to get a demo at Vancouver or Chicago on this piece of neat-looking software. And try to get it soon before Perez launches another round of budget cuts, forcing the demo guys to show new software using nothing but hand puppets.

Linkedin has the news that Stan Coleman has left Creo to join CopperLeaf Technologies as a V.P.

For those of you who don't know, Stan was one of the driving forces behind Prinergy, along with Dave Kauffman, Judi Hess, and Jim Firstbrook (yeah, I left out a few people, I know, I know).

Judi and Dave are still at Kodak. Jim left in 2008. Kevin Ishiguro left a couple of years to head up Kutano (he was #2 behind Stan in the workflow group). All in all, it's not exactly great news that Stan left, but you can't say executive turnover has been high under the reign of Perez (at least in regard to the workflow gr0up).

Even though Kodak's CEO is giving warm fuzzies about the cash flow situation, I think everyone will breathe easier when Labour day has come. The annual purges of August are usually the worst of the year.

Update: Got an email today  confirming that Judi has left Kodak as  well, although her linkedin profile has not yet been updated. (She left sometime before Stan.)

Fubar guy asks why the volume name on the servers are called Araxi.

Glad to oblige and answer that question, as well as adding other bits of Prinergy trivia. The original development team of Prinergy was made up of Jim Firstbrook (Project Engineer), Stan Coleman (Project Manager), and Dave Kauffman (Product Manager) waaaaay back in the mid-nineties. Jim and Stan were assigned to the project exclusively, while D.K. had other responsibilities (like Platemaster, the workflow that was the precursor to Prinergy).

Okay, so one day Jim and Stan go out to a restaurant in Whistler called Araxi. And that's what they named the project.

(Editor's note: Above statement is inaccurate. See comments for notes from Dave Kauffman)

"It was David Kauffman who picked the code name Araxi after a fantastic meal there in 1995 with his wife on a ski holiday. The irony is that a few weeks later we hired Jim Firstbrook who actually knew the owners - Jack and his Greek wife Araxi. True story. Stan cannot be blamed for any of this."

- David Kauffman

Then they went back to work and start bringing developers onto the project and writing specs and all that good stuff. Some of the work involved was bringing on the Heidelberg development team who contributed to the trapper and color management engine, as well as to process plan editor and other GUI stuff. And then the marketing guys started to work on what the name should be for the product that was going to come out of the "Araxi" project.

Now, you would think it would be simple just to assign a name to the product, but its not. When AGFA's Apogee came out and wasn't the big success that everybody wanted it to be, it quickly acquired the name "Apology." I worked on a product called "Prescript" which did not work exactly as expected and in the prepress rooms of our customer, it quickly acquired another name which...um..I don't need to mention here.

Anyhow, Araxi went through a whole bunch of names in the development cycle. My favorite ex-name was "Metro." As a joke, I suggested "Orgasm." There was a (brief) campaign to name it Tojo after the famous sushi restaurant in Vancouver but Tojo was also an infamous Japanese general in WWII so that name definitely wouldn't play well in certain parts of the US.

In the meantime, while all the name wrangling was going on, the engineers weren't going to subsitute "araxi" in the code base until they were pretty darn sure that the name was going to stick. By the time everybody settled on the name "Prinergy," the "araxi" string was so embedded in the code (like with the naming of the volume shares) that it was decided that it was too much work to swap out "Araxi" with Prinergy.

Other Prinergy Trivia that you may or may not care about?

Was there ever an Easter egg in Prinergy?

Yes and no.  In Prinergy one, embedded in the Java workshop was a picture of a backwards-facing cement truck that was a souvenir of the first beta (RRD something, I forget the exact location). The only problem was that the developer who supposedly buried the Easter egg wouldn't tell anybody how to trigger it. Which leads to the question, was there ever really an Easter egg or did the developer just say there was one to get the applications engineers off his back? (Editor's note: See comments for more info on this)

Is it true that the first version of Prinergy was not going to support spot colors?

True. There was a huge fight over that. But then the first version of Apogee didn't support spot colors and the public reaction was so negative that the engineering team put it in.

What was the first thing printed off a Prinergy system?

An auction of OJ belongings after he got his pants sued off in civil court. I kid you not. Typecraft was the printer, down in California.

That's all I can remember for now. I may update this in the future, over a few beers.

A couple of years back while I was integrating a Prinergy system for a client, the tech rep who was in charge of the Integris install had a few war-stories to share so we swapped a few. I have some great ones which I will save for another blog post, but he had some good ones too.

He was responsible for doing some major integration work at Quebecor with regard to workflow. He wasn't a contractor there, just a salary guy, and maybe he knew a little bit more about those computer thingies than the rest of the guys. So he was lead-hand on a major WAN integration project involving Prinergy. He completed a major milestone, basically got everything to work and called the brass in. They took one look at it, saw everything was working, and then asked him when he was leaving.

Now you would BS to such a story thinking who could be such jerks to do that but I could share similar experiences, very similar experiences. I often wonder if that's why so many IT projects go over schedule, because the guys working on the project know they will be canned as soon as the mission is completed successfully.

Anyhow, I bring up this story because even in 2009, the vast history of the massive productivity boost in printing and prepress workflow remains unremarked and unrecorded. It's still going on today, but you would be hard-pressed to find a report of it. How many printers in the last year have let go some outside sales reps because of successful Google Adwords campaigns?

Well some blogs are at least asking the right questions, like hey look at how cheap those LCD TVs are getting

So I spoke to a Prinergy developer a couple of weeks ago and he confirmed that work is started on Prinergy 6, which is pretty cool. Note that I spoke to a developer, not a spinmeister or business-type guy or even a salesperson. If you ever want straight, go chat with a coder and get straight up on what's happening. If a software developer ever shows signs of being able to BS or spin a story, he or she gets automatically kicked up to management. I swear that's true.

Anyhow, Prinergy 6 is on the way, let's Kodak doesn't go bankrupt before it comes out the door. Hey, let's hope Kodak doesn't go bankrupt period. Now why should you care if the next version of Prinergy is released or not? Because Prinergy rocks. If you are a Prinergy user, then no matter how miserable your life is, you can always reflect on the joy and pleasure that is obtainable by simply playing with the Prinergy workshop, or by taming a particularly miserable PDF file created by an incompetent graphic designer. If you are not a Prinergy user, then at least you can hope that one day your shop may  buy a Prinergy system, and thus alleviate your dreary and painful existence.

In the meantime, I grabbed a youtube video of the Prinergy PDF editor available in version 5. It is at an unfortunately low resolution, but a pleasure to watch all the same.