Hah, working from home with kids and swamped with contracts since December 2009.

(got laid off from Creo – not Kodak – in 2004, a loooooong time ago)

Did these guy find any business? Or did they spend their severance package on a webpage?
The last news item was posted in May.

I guess this is where all the Kodak brain power went….

http://www.vikisolutions.com/index.html

This is probably really late but as someone with knowledge of what is going on at Kodak I can assure you they have no clue what they are doing. Much of the Vancouver teams code was sent to Israel but some of it was sent to the US to be maintained and upgraded. I’ve personally spoken to people at both locations and they are all pretty clueless as to what they are working with and many of them have little experience or formal education in software development. From what I’ve gathered Kodak has decided to find the cheapest developers available regardless of their qualifications. These same people are currently working on a Prinergy replacement but as far as I’ve seen it is a total disaster due to inadequate leadership, poor planning, and a total lack of knowledge on the part of many of the developers. The funny part is that Kodak has many companies lined up to buy this Prinergy replacement that isn’t even half finished and has glaringly obvious architectural problems that can’t be fixed without another complete re-write (there have already been two that I know of after 3 years of development). This is why they don’t care one bit if anyone actually has any serious Prinergy knowledge because as you said, Prinergy is dead.

I heard that Prinery is dead. Some that the Israel Developing Team will resurrect the Brisque workflow. I think that 2010 will be a year of spin and stories trying to keep printers in line to spend money on a workflow that will never reach version 5.2. Printers are already talking that Prinery is dead and any wise printer will NOT spend money on a new workflow when there are too many unanswered variables out there. Current Prinergy customer will stay where they are. Other customers who are approached by sales will not buy into Prinergy unless a consumable deal in their favor is made or they are just plain stupid. If you do your research, flags should have gone off when Vancouver was dissolved. The RRDs of the market will be a huge indicator as to where printers will lean.

Tom. What do you know? Exactly? No#1. And when did thee know it? Where do you get your insights and info? The Dayton Gangbangers are barely hanging on after no raises no bonuses and no sack lunches for 2 years. And all the while anything requiring Intelligence and critical thinking runs off to Isrealville. Explain that? What did Scitex Holding know and when did they?
With all the shifting workloads back over to ScitexLand i.e. Isreal? What Gives. Most 15plus Vet’s spend 4 hours a day Stock trading. No wonder workloads are shifting to other countries. I gotta believe an eatherquake’s about to Rock your N.E. worlds and finally lay off or fire a bunch of ancient noah ark wood. Nobody wants to do anything. Who’s in charge? OMG Bureaucratic Ohioians at it again. Where’s Santa? Can someone share ANY information truthfully? That’s all we ask isn’t it?

> do you really think for a second that Kodak would knowingly drive their showcase, award winning, bread and butter workflow into the ground?

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence” ?

Anyone who has worked on a large software project *knows* what is going to happen. I’ll bet no one who made the decision has ever worked on a large software project. The Creo secret sauce was getting the people who know the impact of the decision involved in making the decision. At its core it is just good business sense which in one version or another is applied by all leading technology companies.

I would not worry at all regarding the Stream products. The Stream technology is being launched under the brand name of Prosper. These presses are driven by the Kodak 700 Print Manager that was jointly developed in Israel and the US. So it is proven that cross boundary development is possible and that the Israeli development team is quite competent.

The Prinergy to 700 Print Manager connectivity is already in place and was most recently shown at Print 09. Having further Prinergy development and testing in the same building with Prosper’s DFE is actually a good thing. Prosper Presses can run with or without Prinergy and with an open interface can use other products as well (but we still prefer Prinergy). Prosper also does not use the trapping mentioned above.

I won’t diminish the efforts of those in Vancouver. These people and their expertise will certainly be missed but these products are by no means finished. Scheduled releases and product upgrades and support will be done elsewhere but a professional services & customization team remains to ensure that customer solutions are well integrated and supported.

Prinergy IS dead, long life Prinergy! I think this is great; Kodak will make their next version of their workflow (lets call it Prinergy X or even better Prinergy RIP) cheap and off-the-shelf and build it from scratch. For that it will reuse their R&D department that was ‘almost’ successful in releasing the Kodak MIS software (again RIP). The team in Israel can now do in whay they do best, it can sell something inferior and pimp it up to something typically Kodak style. Something like their cameras, not an IXUS but something simple and cheap. I guess it is all in the selling (it helps if you know the Epicor consultancy language). It is a misconception that customers need something like a db driven WF or even RBA. Top management is always right.

Rest In Peace Prinergy.

They have some good programmers in Israel but the problem with the setup they have over there will be a marked increase in the release cycles compared to the current Burnaby team. The test and development departments in Israel, from my experience, are interfaced in a highly structured way, a holdover from the Scitex days. The development, requirements planning, and test regimes look good on paper, with all the blocks nicely arranged, but the controlled releases take literally years to roll out. Expect new major features to be several years away from release at a minimum. I don’t know how project management is going over there these days but from what I saw they were very much into standard PMI practices, which means S L O W and rigid development.

I always say that companies should stick with what they are good at. Kodak is one of the best companies in the world at relentlessly reducing staff, revenue, and earnings. Their management is obviously sticking with a formula that has “worked” for the past 2 decades. I suppose one could say they are concentrating on their core competencies.