Looking forward to an Indianised version of TransPromo printing

In his current role, Anir Dutta is responsible for business development and industry marketing spanning the Asia Pacific region and the US based headquarters

Earlier this year in Mumbai, we had the opportunity to meet Anir Dutta who is the marketing and business development manager of inkjet printing solutions of the Graphic Communications group at Kodak.

Dutta operates out of Dayton, Ohio in the United States which has for a long time been the development centre for the Scitex high speed ink jet applications that were ultimately acquired by Kodak and are known as the Kodak Versamark.

The Kodak Versamark inkjet heads have been incorporated on high speed midwebs such as the Muller Martini Concept such as the Versamark installation at Gopsons in Noida.

Friends Colour has installed Versamark V series inkjet presses for transactional printing at Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata essentially for bank statements and other transactional work. The public sector MTNL has also invested in four V series Versamark installations. Last year Vakrangee in Mumbai implemented a 5-colour VT3000 series Versamark installation for the output of variable electoral data in multiple languages.

Using the Versamark, photographs of voters are being included in the electoral roll outputs. In addition to these a Versamark ink jet head has also been installed on a Rotatek mid web press in South India. In our meeting with Dutta we discussed some of the issues and challenges faced by variable digital printing in the Indian environment.

Indian Printer and Publisher As far as we know, most transactional printing in the country is still limited to two colours and extremely little of this work uses data mining concepts to incorporate relevant or
“personalised” advertising. There is, as well, an acute shortage of personalized visual or illustrative data.

Anir Dutta This is a key driver although it is not happening in India. A flavour of this is happening in Israel, or Thailand. It could work in India and what is needed is to implement concepts such as cross selling, upselling, and co-branding. Other drivers are colour which can be used to offset the call centre volumes. For instance we should be able to use the technology to make a bill more readable and understandable. We also need to study customer demographics and how to talk to different segments.”

IPP Will the sales paradigms of North America and Europe work for us?

Anir Dutta Producing a technology for the US doesn’t mean that it will work for countries such as China and India. However, print is an essential part of enterprise communication and ink jet is cost effective. What I am seeing is a convergence of between commercial and transactional printing.

Showing us samples of variable printing using data mining from other Asian countries, Dutta added, “I believe that an “Indianised” version of what is being done in these countries will make a positive impact here since successful TransPromo communication needs to be and always has been sensitive to the cultural, ethical and economic realities of the local marketplace”.

IPP We perceive a somewhat slow uptake of variable solutions and data mining in the country. There seems to be a lack of clarity as to who will develop the databases and who will mine them.

Anir Dutta “I believe that India is a growth market for Trans-Promo (transactional and promotional printing), This type of communication is already being done in many countries around the world. In Asia
Pacific, countries such as Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Israel, and Australia have already implemented this across multiple industry verticals such as banking, utilities, telecom, insurance, retail and wealth management.”

Anir Dutta: A brief profile
Anir Dutta is an engineer from Pune University who did his masters in Print management at Rochester University and subsequently an MBA in marketing from Rochester as well. Dutta started at Kodak working for the electrographic drum and toner based Nexpress digital press in 2002.He was a part of the product development team during the acquisition from the 50 per cent joint venture partner Heidelberg.

In his current role, he is responsible for business development and industry marketing spanning the Asia Pacific region and the US based headquarters. Dutta also handles the development of regional marketing, demand generation for all Kodak digital printing products in the region. In this role, he is responsible for various market verticals such as telecom, utility, banking, wealth management, insurance and service bureaus.

- Naresh Khanna