Caldera: Promoting Stability Amid Constant Change

Sebastien Hanssens, vice president, marketing and operations, at Caldera

In its booth at the recent PRINTING United Expo, production software developer Caldera was highlighting three new things. First, said Sebastien Hanssens, vice president, marketing and operations, Caldera was proud to be launching Version 17 of its popular CalderaRIP. Also, the company is answering the needs of its smaller users by making available a subscription model for its products. Finally, the company announced the launch of Prime Center, a new job-prep software that handles ganging/sorting/and nesting ahead of the RIP itself. “It’s harder to do in the RIP,” he says, “so this does it upstream.” He reports a RIP for direct-to-garment printers is currently under development.

Hanssens says an overarching goal in Caldera’s product development is to further automate the printing process by preparing jobs faster and standardizing that preparation where it is possible. The result, he says, is a reduced risk of errors in production, reduction of spoilage, and savings of time. Because Caldera is what he refers to as “printer agnostic,” its product can be used with a wide range of output devices.

Asked whether PSPs today expect more or less out of the RIPs they’re using, Hanssens, says printing devices are more productive than they once were, and the quality differences between them have narrowed significantly. Further, he says, “there are really no new technologies.” Today, color management is the key: “People understand the value of a RIP when they talk about color. You can’t mess around with color. There is no improvisation with color.”

For now, Hanssens says, an ongoing goal for Caldera is to stay up to date with applications, which continue to proliferate due the continued growth of digital printing. “When I walk the show,” he says, “I see a multitude of applications: DTF, DTF, dye-sub, reactive and dispersive dyes. The industry has become much more fragmented.” He says the consumer trend today is to customize everything. “There are so many niches. Production is easy, the challenges is handling all the applications.”

A growing requirement among printing systems is ease of use, and Hanssens says Caldera can fill that need. “Ease of use and graphic interface have always been a key component.” For instance, he says the new Prime Center product is build to “recipes,” so common activities are done the same way every time.