As readers of my past Blog postings already know, I have been working at LRS for 32 years, and have been in the field of Output Management even longer than that. Over my career, I’ve had the opportunity to live in several countries and continents and visit dozens of world-class cities. Soon, I’ll have a chance to return to one of my favorites: the Danish capital city of Copenhagen.
On the 6th of March, LRS will be hosting a technical update and networking event at the Opera House Copenhagen. As I write this from sunny Dubai and work to expand LRS’ presence in the Middle East, I remember how important the Danish market was in my own Output Management journey.
Before joining LRS, I worked for a small company called COTEC Computing Services. Our main offering was a product called CMA-Spool from a Danish company called CMA software. CMA-Spool was an early mainframe-based print management solution that competed with the likes of IBM’s JES328x offering and the original VPS product from LRS. Each of these solutions had advantages and disadvantages, but as the CMA product was developed with the Danish market in mind, it was quite popular there.
Eventually, the CMA-Spool product was acquired by Computer Associates (CA), and COTEC lost our sales rights. In 1993, I learned that LRS was in the process of establishing its own salesforce in Europe. I joined LRS, bringing several of my talented technical co-workers and a lot of industry knowledge as well.
Although I was based out of the UK, one of the earliest markets I worked in was Denmark. With several large banks and an impressive array of global companies, the Danish market was a great fit for LRS’ mainframe-based product offerings. Our VPS/TCPIP product was well-timed for the adoption of TCP/IP networks across Scandinavia. Likewise, with the widespread use of IBM’s Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) architecture in Denmark, our VPS/PCL solution likewise provided a cost-effective way to extend AFP printing to low-cost office printers without specialty hardware.
The Danish market was good to LRS and so were the customers we met at the Danish AFP Users Group, sales meetings, and other events. Business always came first, of course, but afterwards we spent many an hour in unique Danish institutions like Copenhagen’s Musen & Elefanten (Mouse and Elephant) pub and Den Glade Pingvin (Happy Penguin) bar in Struer. Establishments that always seemed curiously close to wherever our last business meeting of the day was located.
Accompanying me in those days was former COTEC colleague and LRS software architect Mark Goddard. Mark came to know Denmark well, working with customers and prospective customers to help CMA-Spool customers migrate to the JES-centric LRS solution set. In the process, he repeatedly heard the need for a non-mainframe-based output management solution.
The open systems environment had no standardized document spooling mechanism equivalent to the proven JES spool on the mainframe. Organizations were (and in some cases, still are) stuck with a clumsy mixture of Windows print servers, Unix and Linux OS-based queues, CUPS, and other mechanisms. This lack of a suitable VPS equivalent for the open systems environment led Mark to develop our VPSX product in 2004; a full-featured output management solution built around widely accepted open standards and a robust document spool modeled on the rock-solid JES facility used in the world’s largest organizations.
Mark is retired now, but his legacy lives on in the VPSX family of open-systems products that run on a variety of operating systems and Cloud platforms. While the solutions have evolved over time to add pull printing, document scanning, and output analytics, they still incorporate lessons learned on the ground in Denmark and other countries over many decades.
While I enjoy Dubai, I’m looking forward to seeing many familiar faces at our upcoming event in Copenhagen and hopefully some new ones as well. It’s been a while since I’ve personally visited Denmark, but I can’t wait to introduce our new LRS team servicing the Danish market to some of my old friends – including long-time customers and perhaps a familiar penguin, mouse, and elephant.
Hope to see you there!
Cheers,
— James