This is a guest blog from Prepress Pilgrim

Please also read Kodak’s Response and Our Take

Prinergy is Dead

I have just received a phone call from a Kodak employee. This morning Kodak served notice to virtually everybody who works in the Willingdon building of Kodak. That's the building that houses the Prinergy development team.

Everybody is being laid of, save for a small remnant. At its peak, there were more than 200 developers who worked on the Prinergy workflow. I'm pretty sure there were more than 100 hundred (update: 100 staff reductions worldwide, definitely fewer than 100 who got laid off in Burnaby) who got served notice today.

Officially, the story is that development will be moved to Israel. However, I doubt they have the staff to handle the migration of such a complex piece of software. I mean, unless they have about five or six dozen developers twiddling their thumbs.

In Burnaby, British Columbia, the plan is to leave a skeleton staff for business strategy and device connectivity. No more than a dozen people.
More details to follow, but at first glance this is a shocking dismemberment. Usually, to mothball a piece of software as large and complex as Prinergy takes about a year or even two. But it looks like Kodak plans on doing it in a matter of months.
Oh my God, this is going to be such a mess....

Update Thursday evening November 6th
The rumor that everybody is being laid off in Vancouver in two weeks time is false. There are two groups. One group is to be laid off by the end of November. The second group will be staying on for three months to help with knowledge transfer.

Next week a group from Israel will be arriving for knowledge transfer and be sticking around for two weeks. That's the origin of the two week rumor.

About 10 developers (coders and testers) and 10 "other" staff (product managers, subject matter experts, and project managers) will stay on in a "consulting" role.

Confirmation that product management and marketing is staying in YVR.

In Israel, the PODS team was cut and KEMS was cancelled. Many believe that the remnants of the KEMS team will be called to take over Vancouver's products.

Worldwide, the net reductions are approximately 100 staff.

An interesting note: Apparently the 3-month staff haven't been told what their severance packages will be and this is causing some "concern."

KODAK’S RESPONSE:

To set the record straight: Prinergy is alive and well and fully supported by Kodak.

In fact, the company’s commitment to KODAK PRINERGY Workflow Systems and to its entire Unified Workflow portfolio has never been stronger. We are committed to the success of our customers and to the continued successful development of our world-class Unified Workflow products and services, including Prinergy, Insite, Preps, ColorFlow, NewsManager, PowerPack and Color Controllers.

So what’s new? We have announced to employees that we will consolidate global product development for Unified Workflow at our site in Israel, and we will focus our customer technical support and marketing operations at our Vancouver site. We will create a world-class, innovative engineering team built around skilled developers, and efficient, effective processes that can drive forward our investment in PRINERGY Workflow and the full Unified Workflow portfolio. Kodak will be better positioned to generate long-term growth for our customers and for Kodak while maximizing our industry leading technology platforms.

This was a very difficult decision because it involves employment reductions. The decision was not in any way based on the performance of our employees in Vancouver, which has been excellent. It was simply based on an analysis of a number of factors, as well as synergies and support infrastructure at the respective sites, in concert with the anticipated future direction of the business. While this does involve reductions, please know that we will have substantial remaining operations in B.C., with more than 500 employees located here.

As you may know, earlier this year, Kodak formed a new business entity, called the Business Solutions and Services Group, to better deliver solutions in our digital world. The strategy behind the group is to enable customers to do more, increase efficiency and grow their businesses — print and enterprise — through offering integrated solutions, consultation and implementation services, enterprise marketing asset management and security, print workflow software, document capture software and hardware and overall service and support.

Our Unified Workflow strategy ensures that Kodak continues to support the traditional print space by delivering automation and integration for customers. We’re also accelerating developments in digital print workflows for hybrid and digital printing at the same time that we develop a new solution business in integration services, custom development and business transformation.

So that’s the news about what has changed. I can assure, as I said at the outset, that one very important fact has not changed: Prinergy is alive and well and fully supported by Kodak.

OUR TAKE: I have been a Creo fan since the days of Scitex, and living a mere hour from Kodak Park in Rochester, there is a certain amount of loyalty to Kodak as well. These changes are troubling, but not inconsistent with the consolidation and cost cutting we are seeing everywhere in this industry.  Israel has always been central to the Creo/Scitex/Kodak family and much product development has been done there over the years. When Creo bought Scitex, much of the development was moved to Canada, but such decentralization is not terribly cost-effective. But the bottom line is it certainly sounds as though there will be an overall cut in development staff. We think that could be a big mistake in the long run. The key will be whether Kodak makes the right choices over the next few years in paring down staff without cutting quality and without endangering market share. Of course the market is volatile and it is also very important to follow the market’s lead in developing software for digital and multi-media workflows. It’s no longer just a printing industry, but an information and data distribution industry. What Kodak has done with some of the engineering insider their Unified Workflow seems to indicate they are well aware of what they are up against.

So all-in-all, this change could be a good thing. Of course if you work in software development in in the Vancouver area, Kodak’s move means job losses and high anxiety, and we wish you well in recovering from this blow.  We earnestly hope Kodak will stand by their employees with generous severance packages as they make these staffing changes.

SB