Reprozwölf

A longtime Cumulus customer witnesses the birth of the CD and the death of digital chaos.

Challenge

Imagine collecting some 2.3 million images over several decades. You stored everything on CD-ROM, and now you need to actually find something on one of those 40,000 discs. How do you search the entire contents of a two-decade-old sea of CDs?

Think fast! You’re client is waiting.

Solution

For Reprozwölf, one of Austria’s leading repro companies, Canto Cumulus digital asset management (DAM) was the solution. During the past decade, Reprozwölf’s Cumulus system has kept the company efficient, kept its customers happy, and now Cumulus even enables Reprozwölf to provide DAM services.

Results and Benefits

• Unlimited digital asset control, including usage rights management, indexing, IPTC metadata and automatic cataloging.
  
• Flexible customization to meet customer demands, from branding the Web interface, to user administration.
  
• Precise color conversion via integration with the HELIOS ImageServer.

Beyond boundaries

Once the production of art becomes a successful business—as it did for Reprozwölf more than 20 years ago—digital asset management becomes essential. To help harness the firm’s enormous image collection, Reprozwölf turned to Canto partner Andreas Schmuck.

Treating bits and bytes with the same level of detail Reprozwölf treats pixels and picas, Andreas Schmuck was a perfect fit, as he explains.

“We really went to the limits with Reprozwölf! We did things with Cumulus even Canto hadn’t seen.“

Cumulus offered versatility, which would be essential for a system Schmuck knew would push the envelope of DAM. But the reason he chose Cumulus for Reprozwölf was because the product has never let him down in all the years he’s been working with it.

“I run Cumulus systems that have not needed any maintenance in years.“

Complementing the core features offered by Cumulus, Schmuck enhanced Reprozwölf’s system with Web-based user management, custom Web appearances that suit clients’ corporate styles, and an integration with the HELIOS ImageServer for pixel-perfect image processing.

One look at Reprozwölf headquarters in Vienna, and it’s clear: this company is all about innovation and design.

The origin of chaos

According to Herbert Unger, technical production advisor for Reprozwölf, the firm’s need for Cumulus actually predated Cumulus.

“In the 80s, we used digital image processing systems that were as big as washing machines!“

CD-ROM was a novelty at the time, Unger recalls, but Reprozwölf knew optical storage was the future, so they dove right in and never looked back.

A gorgeous Web interface based on the Modula4 Web Module was branded and designed by Andreas Schmuck to suit the needs of Reprozwölf. IPTC metadata for each image is automatically captured by Cumulus, and can be edited afterward, even over the Web. Individualized Web interfaces are also created for clients who take advantage of Reprozwölf’s DAM services.

“We solved one problem by archiving images to CDs, but we knew the real challenge would be finding what we needed later.”

The collection ultimately grew to more than 40,000 discs, and throughout the years, Cumulus managed it all.

“Thanks to Cumulus, images on CD-ROMs that date back to 1987 are just as easy to find as images created yesterday.”

But slick searching wasn’t enough.

Color matters most

What most organizations consider “color management,” Reprozwölf considers child’s play.

“When we retouch a picture, we print 10 proofs to get no more than 1% chromatic aberration.”

Considering those standards, it’s no surprise Reprozwölf chose the HELIOS ImageServer for digital image conversions. Accessible from inside Cumulus via Canto’s HELIOS Companion (even over the Web), no commerical image conversion engine offers better quality.

To round out the customizations, Reprozwölf adopted user management and rights management plug-ins from Canto partner Amides, and then wrapped the entire system into the beautiful Web Module from Canto partner Modula4.

Software as a savings

Reprozwölf knew the same benefits it gained from Cumulus could be extended to clients.

“Our clients would never buy a DAM system of this scale, but we knew they’d benefit from it.”

That idea today is a service through which clients maintain their own catalogs, and manage it all from Web browsers. One success story comes from Austrian telecom giant, Orange, which previously spent €200,000 annually in courier costs. Now, Reprozwölf’s service saves them 60% each year, or €1.2 million over a decade.

Savings also continue for Reprozwölf, which sees data volume increase at rate of 12% annually. An impressive rate, but nothing that concerns Schmuck, who remains confident Cumulus can easily handle that and more.

“Cumulus is simply the best product available to manage a broad variety of data.“