Early history Indigo was the name of the company originally founded by
Benny Landa in 1977. Landa, known as "the father of digital offset color printing," was born in
Poland to post-World War II Jewish refugee parents, who later immigrated to
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The early years of Indigo were focused primarily on research and development. One of the earliest developments was a sheet cassette for copiers and other copier and printing-related equipment. The company's first product would be a digital plotter/duplicator, bringing the tiny company (its 1991 sales totaled less than US$5 million, generating a profit of $440,000) head-to-head with such industry giants as
Xerox and
Canon. The early 1990s brought a significant change in the company. In 1993, Indigo launched the E-Print 1000 at the
IPEX trade show. The E-Print 1000 eliminated the expense and labor of the plate-printing setup process by printing directly from a computer file, thereby simultaneously enabling inexpensive short-run color printing. Images not only could be readily changed, they could be changed from page to page, requiring neither additional setup nor pauses in the print run. This was made possible by the Liquid Electrophotographic (LEP) process, which employed a high-speed laser scanner, along with a drum-shaped photoreceptor and charged, liquid toner (composed of pigment, resin, and carrier fluid) to produce the image. In 1994 Indigo had an
initial public offering on the
NASDAQ stock exchange, selling 52 million shares at $20 per share and raising $100 million. At the
drupa trade show in 1995, Indigo launched another product: the Omnius press. Whereas E-Print focused on medium-volume single-sheet printing, Omnius brought digital printing to a variety of surfaces, including plastic, cardboard, film, and, especially, cans, bottles, and other packaging surfaces. Omnius was the precursor of what then became Indigo's portfolio of labels and packaging presses. At the end of 1995, Indigo sales did not reach the expected levels, and the company had to downsize. Despite a rise in revenues to $165 million, the company posted its fourth year of losses, of about $40 million. However,
George Soros and other investors still believed in the company's potential and increased his investment to 30 percent of Indigo's shares by 1997. By 1998, the company improved its product reliability and performance, and its revenues passed the $200 million mark for the first time. On September 6, 2001,
HP announced that it would acquire the remaining outstanding shares of Indigo N.V. (NASDAQ: INDG) for approximately $629 million in HP common stock and a potential future cash payment of up to $253 million contingent upon Indigo's achievement of long-term revenue goals, for an aggregate potential payment of up to $882 million. In the following years, HP continued to invest in Israel-based graphic arts companies, acquiring Scitex Vision in 2005 and Nur Macroprinters in 2007. The combined presence of other employees of HP in Israel (which includes not only employees of the Indigo division, but also of
Scitex and Israeli's divisions of
HP Labs made HP the second-largest foreign employer after
Intel. In August 2009, HP announced that they had reached the milestone of 5,000 HP Indigo digital presses in operation around the world. In 2010, the trade magazine Print CEO ranked the company Number 1 in the US high-volume digital press market. HP Indigo was noted to have a 75% share of the world market for digital commercial photo printing.
Moving beyond SRA3 format: Fourth Generation presses In March 2012, HP Indigo unveiled the fourth generation of the Indigo product portfolio, and released it to market a year later. This was the first press of their fourth generation of products, the first that went beyond the SRA3 size into oversized B2. By March 2016, when the company unveiled the Indigo 12000 (an updated version of the Indigo 10000), there were 200 Indigo 10000 customer installations in 20 countries. In February 2019, HP Indigo announced the one-thousandth installation of this the fourth generation presses. In 2014, HP Indigo began installing digital presses, aimed at the flexible packaging and
folding carton markets, respectively.
PrintOS A key milestone for HP Graphic Arts at drupa 2016 was the introduction of PrintOS, a cloud-based technology to help customers oversee their presses, manage day-to-day production activities, and facilitate connectivity and business growth. It is available to HP Indigo customers, as well as users of other HP technologies like Designjet and PageWide Press. In March 2019, HP said that more than 20 thousand users were connected to PrintOS. Some of the applications available for PrintOS include Site Flow, Print Beat, Box, Knowledge Zone, and Marketplace. ==Business Model==