FuturePrint Podcast
FuturePrint is dedicated to and passionate about the power of print technology to enable new opportunities and create new value. This pod features deep-dive discussions with the people behind the tech as well as market analysis, trends, marketing and storytelling!
FuturePrint Podcast
#238 Fiery - The Hidden Power of a True Digital Front End in Industrial Print
In this episode, we're joined by Toby Weiss, CEO of Fiery LLC, and Marcelo Tomoyose, responsible for business development in industrial inkjet solutions at Fiery. Together, we'll explore how Fiery's cutting-edge digital front-end technologies are shaping the future of industrial printing, simplifying complex production processes, and empowering manufacturers to accelerate their transition from analogue to digital. Toby and Marcelo will share valuable insights, real-world examples, and discuss key industry partnerships that are driving innovation in digital printing.
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FuturePrint TECH: Industrial Print: 21-22 January '26, Munich, Germany
Welcome to the Future Print Podcast, celebrating print technology and the people behind it.
Speaker 2:So welcome to this week's podcast. I have got Toby Weiss and Marcelo Tomoyose from Fiery with me today. Hello, it's a pleasure to have you with me today. Would you like to just Hello, do you want to just introduce yourselves? Maybe we'll start with Toby If you could give me a bit of background as to where you come from, what you do, and then we'll follow up with Marcelo as well.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much. It's such a pleasure to be here. My name is Toby Weiss. I am the fortunate soul who gets to be the CEO of Fiery LLC, the world's largest independent maker of digital front ends and workflow software for production print. So I'm based here in California, in the Bay Area, silicon Valley, our Fremont headquarters, and it's just a delight to be here with you today. I get the privilege of leading a team of about 800 people. Wow, that's a lot, it feels like a lot some days and never enough other days.
Speaker 3:And you know just a group of amazing professionals who help our partners and our you know OEMs and our dealers ultimately enable end customers to help with this transition from analog to digital print.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Thank you very much. And over to you, marcelo. Can you tell us a bit about yourself please?
Speaker 4:Sure, let me. I'm from Brazil. Yeah, you see, my accent is a little bit different.
Speaker 2:Lovely accent.
Speaker 4:I started at EFI since 2014. It is now FIRI. Right now I'm responsible for the business development for the industrial inkjet solutions, especially our core product for this line, that's the Firing Press.
Speaker 2:Okay, fantastic. So shall we start with just talking a little bit about Firing? So, just in a nutshell, you're obviously sort of a software development company, but there's a lot more to it. So you're a leader in DFE technology and you've been a leader for over 30 years. How has that shaped the print industry and what's changing in industrial print today? Do you think Should we start with you, Toby?
Speaker 3:Yeah, why don't I take that one? So you know, as you mentioned, we're a leader in digital front end technology and that includes the software and hardware we actually make our own ASIC that helps us accelerate our solutions and give us very high performance and hardware that we combine with our software. I think a lot of times that magic happens in between the hardware and the software, in between the hardware and the software, and what we do is, you know, I oftentimes describe it as the brains of a digital printer. The original Fiery started as something that turned a copy machine into a network printer. Basically, and you know, in working with our OEM partners, our Fiery combined with their copier, you know, and ultimately became network printers, which ultimately became production. You know, narrow format cut sheet devices and you know, over the years we expanded really into wide format printing, into other areas and ultimately built a solution for industrial print.
Speaker 3:And so we have a fairly new product line with our new flagship product called Fiery Impress, and that's a solution that allows companies who make industrial print machines, whether it is in packaging, various parts of packaging, you know folding carton, labels, it could be corrugated, and you know, textile any area of production print really, although most of the action seems to be in single pass these days and allows them to make their printers and their presses faster and better, so ultimately allowing them to get to market sooner with high performing presses that have fantastic color management, integration into the rest of the factory, whether it's their accounting systems, web workflow, so on and so forth, and that's really what's going on. We aim to do what we did for the MFP and copy market in industrial print with this new product. We took all of our learnings over the last 30 years to really take the best of what we have and add a whole bunch of new, to come up with a solution that allows industrial press manufacturers really to shine.
Speaker 2:Okay, Marcella, do you have anything to add there? I mean, obviously you've taken sort of all your experience from the office printing world to sort of then move that into the industrial applications. So, Marcelo, what do you think makes a true DFE like Fari Impress so valuable?
Speaker 4:Well, talking about the history of the company, the company has disrupted many times history of the company. The company has disrupted many times the office printing, the proofing industry for digital proofing. I think we are in a new moment. I'm very proud to be part of this moment where we are starting to disrupt the applications on the industrial inkjet. Fari brings, as Toby told, a lot of experience from the 30 years. We are delivering much more than a single rip, but at least we are delivering a solution, a full solution, where we can help the press manufacturers to develop their press in a much faster way, using much less resources and also delivering to the end users, for the brand owners, all the solutions, all the technologies they need to deliver the proper products for their customers. I think we are creating a new story right now in the industrial inkjet print market. I'm really happy to be here.
Speaker 4:It's a unique moment for me.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. So obviously it takes a huge amount of investment and it takes years to sort of develop these things. How does FIWEE's technology, how does it help manufacturers speed up the process you sort of touched on that just now but also how does it reduce the whole complexity of the project?
Speaker 3:Maybe I'll start there and, marcelo, feel free to add to that. I think it probably starts with an understanding of you know what a digital front end is. A lot of people you know in the market think, oh, a DFE is a rip, you know, or it's just helping me. Do you know my image processing? When, in fact, a digital front end is a lot more than just a rip. You know, it's something that, as I said, is sort of the brains of the press. It's doing, if it's going to do a great job it's going to do high-speed file streaming. It's going to do color management. It's going to integrate in with the rest of their environment. It's going to provide native JDF. It's going to provide new, modern APIs for them to integrate with.
Speaker 3:It's going to provide automation all of these things color management and screening, of course, but way more than just what people think of as a RIP. And so when you go in and you're providing that with a very easy to use way to integrate it into the press, then the press manufacturer really doesn't have to worry about any of those things. And when they go to market and as soon as their customer says, oh I have this workflow that you didn't think about, or that workflow, or I want to integrate it, this no-transcript, enable their customers to be running and getting as much print on that machine as fast as possible. And that's really what we aim to do in partnering with these press manufacturers.
Speaker 3:So as you said there's a lot in there.
Speaker 2:They're really, really important.
Speaker 3:And I think most our experience is most press manufacturers aren't necessarily experts in all of those areas, and so they know the fantastic way to build a machine and they can effectively take a digital front end almost like a component. You know the same way. If you're building a car, you wouldn't insist on building every single aspect of that car yourself. You may say I'm going to get tires from somewhere else, or I'm going to get motors, I'm going to get batteries, I'm going to get, you know, glass from others. Right, and that's the modern way that new industrial printers are made. And so you know, we become this incredibly crucial component or module inside an industrial print facility. Okay, fantastic.
Speaker 2:So I'm assuming you've got sort of lots of companies you work with and lots of companies you've helped. Can we sort of maybe this is one for you companies you've helped? Can we sort of maybe this is one for you? Marcelo, can we look at a real life example, maybe um one of your customers that you've you've helped um and you've sort of helped them face challenges?
Speaker 4:okay, um, we have a few, uh, but I have a one in specific. Uh, it's a small company in the US. They call it ColorDyne. Yeah, colordyne is a company that does. They call it RetroFruit. Basically, they created the print engines where they convert analog flexo presses and hybrid printers flexopresses and hybrid printers.
Speaker 4:We got in touch two years ago with ColorDyne. Colordyne are claiming about a few issues. They usually have issues with color management VDP is a big challenge for them, for example, and some aspects of automation. Basically, what we made, we made an evaluation, their requirements, what they are looking, their challenges and we propose some of the integrations, some of the technology that we can add to their solution to improve their product. One of the solutions that we created it's the streaming part. Yeah, we integrated the streaming.
Speaker 4:It was a very funny comment about one of their directors After they implement Fiery on their press, they improve the uptime of their customers. That's something that we never expect to hear that, but it's very nice to hear Basically solve most of their color issues. In the past, they needed to have multiple solutions from multiple vendors to find, from multiple vendors to find a solution for one specific application. With DeFi, they can use basically one workflow. It's really really simple to use, very friendly. Right now we are working with Dan about two years and we are having a very positive feedback from him before and after we add this kind of technology for them.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. So sorry, toby, did you want to jump in?
Speaker 3:I was going to, if you don't mind. I think ColorDine is such an amazing customer and you know we're so proud to have them. A lot of people think of Fiery and they of course, know that we were part of a company called Electronics for Imaging, efi, and EFI was a leader in a lot of areas of industrial print and I think that dragged us into the industrial print market, maybe before it was even ready, and so you know we drive the EFI corrugated Nozomi is certainly the leader in the corrugated market and drive all the Vutec. You know high end, wide format and super wide format printers.
Speaker 3:And they may even know you know that, where the digital front end and the land folding carton machines. And so you know you look at that and you say, oh, there's a company. Okay, they work with the leading, you know corrugated packaging manufacturer, the leading folding carton. You know manufacturing land is obviously getting into. You know flexible packaging as well and you know you sort of say but what we did with Fiery Impress and I think what makes the ColorDyne story so exciting is we took all of our learnings. Frankly, you know it was not easy to start an industrial print. There's sometimes machines that have eight colors or 12 colors. Someone came to us with a 16-color machine the other day, believe it or not, and the speeds are enormously fast. And all this. And you know we took those learnings and said how can we just make it easier for manufacturers? How could we make it so that it doesn't take them? You know, years to work with a DFE vendor and to get everything right.
Speaker 1:And we had a phenomenal case study.
Speaker 3:We can't talk about the customer yet, but literally two weeks ago a customer and print manufacturer in China downloaded our firing press product, got it integrated into their press and then started a beta. You know, signed a subscription and signed a beta customer. We weren't even really involved, just our salesperson. No one in you know support or R&D or you know anything like that. So we're getting to the point where we're able to take this incredibly powerful technology and just make it very easy to use.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ok, fantastic. So you've spoken about your partnerships with sort of major industry players like Landa, adobe, esco and GIS and Epson, of course. So how do these partnerships support the industry as a whole? If we're now looking at the whole market, how do you feel is sort of progressing the market forward? How do you feel you know Fiery's helping there?
Speaker 3:Sure, marcel, why don't I start? And then you can add to that If you look at the market, it's obviously going through a big transition and there's many episodes on this fantastic podcast about this transition from analog to digital print and a transformation in the industry. And you know, you sort of take a step and say how can we best enable that transition or take advantage of that transition? And one way would be you know, try to make printers and do it soup to nuts. And the other would be to say, well, how could we enable many companies to make digital printers? And if many companies are making digital printers, then the transition will happen faster and better. And you know, there'll be lots of competition and there'll be different printers for different niche needs and workflows and so on.
Speaker 3:And that's our approach. Our approach is to be able to make the digital front end. You know a component If you go to China right now where a lot of the digital print machines are being made and I think last count I saw you know 50 or 60 wide format vendors and 50 or 60 direct-to-film vendors you know there's a lot of industrial. If you were at Drupa, it felt like you know, on the floor I think there was more Chinese vendors even than German vendors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3:If you look at that, how they're making printers is really in this modular approach. It's almost I'd say it's almost like my children make young children make Legos you know in the booklet, and they kind of have these. You know, okay, plug this piece into that. And so you look at the important components of someone's going to make a printer. They buy inkjet heads, they need a transport. You know they need electronics and you know they need a digital front end. So by making this a modern module, it allows people to assemble printers faster. And I think that that speaks to why Seiko Epson Corporation ultimately wanted to acquire.
Speaker 3:Fiery is their leading vendor of inkjet heads. In fact, they're the leading vendor of inkjet heads and so they saw in the market you know a need that, aha, people are buying heads but then they're eventually going to need you know Fiery, you know digital front ends and other. You know components there. So our approach is to do this with partnerships. You know Seiko Epson as a as a partnership based company. They work with many, many, many companies to help them build printers and to enable other companies to build printers. And you know Fiery also is a partner based company, and so that's how we see the market really evolving is that people are able to take the absolute best components together and assemble solutions easily.
Speaker 2:Okay, marcelo, would you like to add anything there?
Speaker 4:Yeah, basically, talking specifically about this partnership that we had with JS, esco, everything started in 2022. Visiting customers, talking with the market. We've seen that, as Toby told, nowadays manufacturers are more like integrators and one of the big challenges for the manufacturers is to make the integration of the parts. Yeah, and we understand we have one of the best solutions of the market in terms of DFE. But how we create an ecosystem? Okay, and you start to think who is the best guy from the pre-head electronics, gis? Okay, we needed to create something with them where we can integrate both solutions to deliver an easy way for the manufacturers to do their process. In the discussions with GIS, they seen the same vision than us and we'd start to work together After that.
Speaker 4:Okay, we have another gap. We needed to have advanced pre-press workflow. Who is the best on the market? Esco, and we started to increase, start some discussions with ESCO and basically, we started to grow this partnership. Yeah, we are launching some technology together. Very sooner, just for you to know, we are launching the new version of the FirePress 1.3 that came with a lot of integrations from ESCO side. Gis already has their integration with their printhead solutions. Customers can buy end-to-end solutions without writing any kind of code from prepress, workflowressed workflow, dfe and print head electronics.
Speaker 2:Okay, fantastic Okay. So I'd like to sort of go back and touch on Epson again, obviously because they were the global leader in inkjet heads. So how do you see sort of how do use that sort of sort of collaborate, all your collaborations really, and how do you see where do you see the biggest opportunities in the market at the moment? So where do you think FIRI? How can FIRI support that growth? And now again, this is stepping back and looking at sort of the whole industrial inkjet market when do you think it's going? What's happening?
Speaker 3:And so what? Clearly, seiko, epson, as you said, is outselling Head, so they're going to see a lot of the customer engagements first and customers after that are going to say, okay, I need workflow, I need all these other modules. So I think the head manufacturers and the electronics manufacturers are going to be right away sort of first step. And what happened with digital front ends is people tend to think about it afterwards. They start building press and they say oh shoot, the color doesn't work, or how do I get it to go faster?
Speaker 3:And so with this firing press and partnerships with head manufacturers and certainly Epson, allow us to, you know, take a step forward in you know, shift to earlier in the cycle and make people aware of oh hey, by the way, you know you are going to need one of these and if you do it this way, it can kind of be a lot easier and you can get to market faster.
Speaker 3:And so you know what, when you ask sort of where it's all going, if you're able to make modules that allow people to build printers faster and more people to make printers, you really have a very healthy market and healthy ecosystem and you start to see very creative uses for what people can do with industrial print. We launched a product with a company called Packsize at Drupal, which is a box making machine. It allows upright, glued, right-sized box to come out of a machine every six seconds. So think of your e-commerce, where you're buying a product online and it comes with all that stuffing in the box, so the product doesn't shake around when you get it, but they can make a box that's exactly the right size of the product. The product is secure, they don't have to have all the stuffing in it, they use less material. And oh, by the way, now they can add print to the box, which is a value add. You could put a Lena message on it or congratulations.
Speaker 2:View your print on all your six items While being sustainable at the same time.
Speaker 3:Right, exactly and so it's something that people might not have imagined as an application, and we're seeing all sorts of things like that, where people are printing on different shapes. People are printing on sneakers, on handbags, on parts of cars you know parts of cars and you know. That's truly amazing and that allows for, you know, a lot less resource usage, as you pointed out. It allows for, you know, a lot less inventory, just in time manufacturing. You know all of these things, so we're just going to continue to see an explosion in various aspects of print. Right now, most of the action seems to be around packaging, to be honest, but there's just a lot going on all over the place.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, and Marcelo, would you like to add anything there?
Speaker 4:No, I think Tobias was pretty clear. Yeah, I think this is Epson, like other players's, just our, I think our goal it's always deliver, uh, a better technology. Yeah, I, I tell um when I I always tell about the fe. The fe it's more than just a render engine, but theFE is something that we can connect the press to the rest of the world. Yeah, our concept of DFE it's much more than render and screening. We have the ability to make the job more efficient. Yeah, not only thinking about speed, but also how we can optimize in the customer production. Uh, I have a great example. Yeah, toby can give more details about that. He knows very well about that.
Speaker 4:But recently we launched a new product we call fire inky wise. Fire inky wise is a solution where we can control the warehouse, the inventory of the customer inks. Yeah, yeah, basically, we can detect. The press basically is connected to the cloud in one of our cloud solutions we call FireQ, and we know how much inventory they have. They adjust automatically via AI. They can automatically adjust the inventory. They make sure the customer uses the ink closest to the expiration date. It's much more than a ripping engine, but it's part of the press ecosystem and we are always taking care to make sure that we can deliver from our technology everything required to make the press more efficient and deliver the best product for the end user.
Speaker 2:Okay, and I mean it's interesting that you say AI I'm assuming you know that is a major driver in your industry and in your business. I mean it's happening everywhere at the moment. It is it really is, and you know, as a company with you know I mean it's happening everywhere at the moment.
Speaker 3:It is. It really is and you know, as a company with, you know, over 400 resources dedicated to, you know, building the software and the hardware for the digital front end. Ai is, you know, helping make us a lot more productive, get our solutions to market faster. Thankfully, in the imaging area, ai has been used for years and years and years decades actually, right, yeah, so I think we are privileged to get a head start on a lot of AI and, of course, we've been using it for years in things like image scaling and areas like that. But what you see now is really being able to use AI to automatically generate prompts for, you know, users, to have them interact with the system. Certain ways we're actually showing off a product you know that we're going to call, probably, fiery Scribe.
Speaker 3:Okay, A little bit of a reveal here on the show, but you know that allows people to send jobs to the FIRI using, you know, their own native language. So, hey, please reorder me a hundred of the same that I did last time, but you know, this time maybe please put the staple in the other spot, whatever, something like that, right, which is going to be. You know the usage of a system, and one of the really neat applications we have now is something called Inkwise, which allows end customer, using our AI, to be able to manage their purchasing of ink. It's not like a silly thing, but if you look at industrial ink providers, it's really important to be able to manage their purchasing of ink. It sounds like a silly thing, but if you look at industrial ink providers, it's really important.
Speaker 2:It's one of the yeah.
Speaker 3:It sounds silly, but what we found is that customers are ordering, you know, more ink than they need, in which case it expires.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's expensive as well, it's not, you know?
Speaker 3:You choose up working capital. If you spend money on it, it's money that's not in the business, or not in the owner's pocket in some cases, or if you don't order enough ink. You're then having to pay rush charges or borrow it, you know, at higher prices, and so it's just like every other manufacturing. Optimizing this improves your working capital, and so we, you know, analyze customers' work and tell them you know, based on rules. The rule being you know, analyze customers work and tell them you know, based on rules. The rule being you know you never want to run out of ink and you don't want to have too much ink, and you have these parameters you play with and you know ultimately puts, you know, potentially tens of thousands of dollars back into the business absolutely.
Speaker 2:Well, that's, that's good. Okay, so, um, I think we've covered everything, but if you, if there's anything else you'd like to um talk about, we've covered everything. But if you, if there's anything else you'd like to um talk about, now's the time, marcello, anything you want to add? Or toby, do you want to add anything else?
Speaker 3:no thanks. No, it was super being here. We really appreciate it fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, it was, thank you. It was an absolute pleasure to have you um, and I just want to thank all our listeners for tuning in today as well, and I think, marcello, I will see you in valencia. You're going to be there and you're giving a talk there, I believe yes, I see you in a few weeks. Yes, it's only in a few weeks. I look forward to it it would be a pleasure to be there excellent. Well, thank you very much for being here with me today. Thank you, okay, bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe now for more great audio content. Coming up and visit futureprinttech for the latest news, partner interviews, in-depth industry research and to catch up on content from Futureprint events. We'll see you next time on the Futureprint Podcast.
