 Live from Massachusetts, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org, SiliconANGLE TV on the ground at the Virtualization Technology User Group, or VTUG, fall forward 2014. Talking to users here at the conference, joining me for this segment is John Judson, who is the Senior Systems Analyst with Courier Corporation. John, thank you for coming. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Stu. Great. So Courier Corporation, can you tell us a little bit about it and your use of technology? Yeah, we're a book printer, and we print custom textbooks, we print the Gideon Bible, we print all kinds of cool stuff, and our challenge has been a transition from printing large runs of books to short runs, and we've kind of met that challenge by going to inkjet printers and using virtualization to speed up the actual process with which we're ripping apart PDFs and presenting to the printer so they can get a book out the door. All right. So John, when most people think of inkjet, they think of this thing sitting on their desk or down there. Talk to us a little bit. You said this thing is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and you've got a couple of them. What are the challenges of kind of getting the data to these printers, and where do you have them? All right. So we've got three T300 presses from HP in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and we have two 450s from HP out in Kindle, Indiana. And again, the print engine itself is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It's kind of curved like that too. It's kind of neat. And the paper runs through these things 300 feet per second on the T300, and I think it's 450 feet per second on the T450. We have actual racks of blade servers whose sole purpose is figuring out when to turn the inkjet heads on and off to get the ink on the paper as it's streaming through this. So we had to kind of rethink our whole printing mentality from plates and the old offset press process of spinning ink onto paper. And how do we go from an analog process to a digital process? All right. So, John, as we've gone from physical to virtual, you're still going to be with physical paper. What has the changing role of the publisher and online versus self-publishing? How is that impacting your business? Well, one of the things that we're looking at these days, and it's very popular, is the customizable textbook where publishers instead of having to sell an entire book of intellectual property to a customer can now offer schools or professors customized textbooks where they choose, select chapters, and can even upload their own content. And then instead of having to print 500 or 1,000 books to be cost-effective, they can print 22 for their class. So it's changed the whole dynamic of printing large numbers of books down to very short print runs and having to get many of those out the door. And the old model we had was constrained by the physical speed of the processors and the underlying disks that the application was relying on. We were able to get the vendor to nod their heads and say, yeah, we'll work in a virtualized environment. And we were able to take that constraint and actually kill it with virtualization. It was a very powerful win for us. All right. So you mentioned education as a use case. Any other industries that you've seen be able to undertake this change in kind of the print world? We're going down a path of self-publishing also. We're looking at providing customers with the ability to print their own books. And we have FastPencil.com where we actually allow people to upload content. They can work with established authors and publishing professionals and edit their material and prepare a professional book with their content and get it printed at a very cost-effective price. It's a very web-centric, new age path instead of having to mail many scripts in and all that kind of process. It's all online. It's cool. So John, tell me, this is a nice local event. You're a local company here. What brings you out and what do you hope to gain from attending conferences like the VTUG here at Gillette? Well this is my third or fourth VTUG event that I've been to. And these folks always do a great job. The keynote speakers, they always have something interesting to say. It's nice to kind of get your finger on the pulse of the industry. It's a great chance to walk around and talk to vendors. Both the ones that you know or you have an interest in and meet new ones. There's always something interesting to talk to up to the people. And then the breakout sessions are a good chance to have a more in-depth conversation or hear a specific strategy or thought process as to what's going on in technology and how that might help us. So it's a great place to be. All right. Well John, I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us. We're talking to all the users here at the Virtualization Technology User Group. Check out youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE and siliconangle.tv to catch all the videos that we're shooting at this and many other shows that are changing the world of technology.