Vibal steps into a digital future

MANILA, Philippines - The storied Vibal Publishing House, started in 1953 by an enterprising couple at a modest 200-square-meter lot on EDSA and Quezon Avenue, is no more.

Well, at least the old version of it is. In its stead rises the Vibal Group which, according to its president and CEO Gus Vibal (son of founders Hilarion and Esther Vibal), “emphasizes the movement of (the) business from education to technology… we are no longer just concerned with education, but (also) with testing and assessment… We want to know the learning outcomes when children use our content.”

Speaking at the open house in the firm’s headquarters in Quezon City, Vibal continued that the company is now aspiring to become the “top Philippine and Asian purveyor of a digital lifestyle.” This entails creating an aggregate of digital content and offering digital services and products to both public and private sectors.

He espouses the promotion of a “digitally literate and ecologically friendly (paper-free) society,” where the Vibal Group would become the “go-to content and technology partner for education, government, and enterprise.”

The company’s venture into the digital domain is not a tentative, half-hearted step, either. Vibal invested some P182 million to establish its cloud data servers and digital presses — acquiring the infrastructure from technology giant HP.

The Vibal-HP open house showcased the products and services now made possible by the partnership: e-books/digitization, custom app development, printing services, testing systems, custom cloud services, and digital printing. Visitors were also taken on a plant tour to see the existing equipment — both analog and digital.

For his part, HP’s GM for digital press in Asia-Pacific and Japan Oran Sokol revealed that printed books are on the decline. Even newspapers, gleaned through shrinking advertising spending, are not as big as they once were. “This is creating big pressure in print media,” he said.

He pointed to the Darwinian tenet of changing or perishing — and that this is “good for humans, and correct for business.” While showing a slide of famous international brands, Sokol said these big marques have a crucial thing in common — that they have gone digital through strong Web, cloud, and mobile presence. HP, he added, had helped these big companies — including the likes of Audi, Shell, Coca-Cola, Time, Virgin, Heineken, and Visa — face their digital future.

The old “print and pray” business model is no more, he declared. It is no longer sound to print a lot of copies then hope people would snap them up. Instead, four business models are emerging with contemporary digital printing: print to order (sell first, print later), print to stock (print smaller quantities), customization (taking a set of data and versioning it for custom use per market), and personalization (so-called “books of one”).

Still, Sokol said, “We are not here to replace offset (printing). We want to work together with offset.” He explained that at print runs in excess of 10,000 copies, the offset option might be better.

When asked by The STAR to explain the cost effectiveness and the quoted figure, the HP executive said the print-run number is variable. “It depends on what you are printing and what technology you are using,” he said. “(It’s important to) look at total cost of operations as well as how much you are saving on inventory and labor, while minimizing waste.”

With the Vibal Group’s acquisition of the HP T230 color inkjet Web press — a versatile, full-color, 20.5-inch printer that boasts 400-feet-per-minute printing speed — the company more widely opens doors to a revenue stream that includes books on demand, personalized notebooks, journals, magazines, variable test booklets, checks and ballots, credit card statements, and even security forms.

Vibal also procured an HP Indigo for short-run, photo-quality printing. To form the backbone of its cloud and data services, Vibal bannered the HP 3PAR Storeserv 7200, and the HP Blade System C7000 which enables high-speed data processing.

“Philippine education and government are changing rapidly because of increasing social use of technology,” said Gus Vibal, adding that we are now seeing the rise of the Philippine digital culture. In a 2012 study commissioned by Vibal, it was discovered that the country had some three million e-book readers.

The advent of mobile Internet devices has also meant people getting online whenever they want to. The Vibal Group thus wants to get into the four major technological domains to future-proof itself: mobile, social networking, broadband, and digital text.

“Business beyond printing,” is how the company sees the changes in its future. Indeed, while Vibal Group still prints books the old-fashioned way, it grabs tomorrow and its technology firmly in its hand.

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For more information, call 988-5800 local 359, visit www.vibalgroup.com or e-mail at [email protected].