Elixir Technologies Corporation

Elixir Technologies Corporation

Type	Private
Industry	Document Output for Customer Communications Management (DOCCM), Computer Software, Information Technology, Document Management Services, Print Publishing, Business Process Automation
Founded	Los Angeles, United States (1985 (1985))
Founder(s)	Basit Hamid
Headquarters	Ojai, California, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Products	Tango, Opus, Opus Director, Vitesse, Transformation Suite, DesignPro Tools, Blue Ocean
Website	elixir.com tango.elixir.com

Elixir Technologies is a private multinational software development company, founded in 1985 and headquartered in Ojai, California, United States.

The company develops and markets collaborative software for dynamic publishing of batch/high-volume documents, on-demand correspondence, and interactive personalized multichannel communications. Elixir’s Tango platform is 100 percent web-based, providing modules for layout and design, data management, business logic creation, content management, and production. These modules are integrated with Tango’s workflow and management components to provide business process design and control related to these workflows. Its web-oriented architecture allows the flexibility to deploy in the cloud as software as a service or hosted on-premise. In its September 2011 report an Independent Research firm stated that "Elixir has taken a bold SaaS direction…” and that “Tango is the first DOCCM SaaS offering."

Tango is preceded by a suite of earlier Elixir products architected in the client-server model. These are packaged software products developed for variable data publishing and form design to support specific print environments. Product offerings include document composition, form design, print resource creation and editing for Xerox and AFP print environments, print stream conversions and document archival. Elixir’s best-known products under this previous architecture are Opus, DesignPro Tools for Xerox, DesignPro Tools for AFP, Vitesse , and Transformation Suite.

Elixir employs over 250 employees globally (2011), and has customers in more than 70 countries. The company has development and technical support operations in Czech Republic and Pakistan and sales and marketing operations in the United States, Europe, Dubai, Singapore and China.

Elixir markets and sells its technology and services directly and through software partners and major technology vendors. Elixir also has a dedicated Professional Services division providing custom application development for Elixir solutions as well as services related to training, deployment, and maintenance.

History

1975- 1984 - The Early Years

Basit Hamid, CEO - Elixir Technologies Corporation

In 1977, the first promising laser printer, the Xerox 9700, the world’s first production cut sheet laser printing system, was out in the market and gaining popularity. At 120 pages per minute, the 9700 proceeded to transform variable data all-points-addressable printing globally in financial services, government, education and many other industries. However, with all their speed, these printers had no way of connecting to the Xerox’s form design systems at the time; the Three Rivers PERQ minicomputer and Xerox Star 8010. Both lacked any communication interfaces with the Xerox 9700 printer which meant that users had to program documents in a non-graphical manner using proprietary languages directly on the printer. The technical inability for the Xerox design station and printer opened up an opportunity for Basit Hamid in 1980 who co-founded the Intran Image Management Group at Intran Corporation. At that time the Metaform system was also developed, which was the first document design workstation to be marketed commercially. In 1982-1983 Intran developed tools based on PERQ to eliminate the need to program documents. Intran was one of the first companies to develop a work station having a high resolution display, mouse and graphical user interface (GUI), (the Three Rivers PERQ), with a new technology of laser printing (Xerox 9700). Several companies came out of Intran including Elixir Technologies, TyRego, LaserMaster. Seeing this potential for document composition tools, Basit Hamid left Intran in 1984 and set out on developing the first What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) line of products to interface with the Xerox 9700. The founding of Elixir was the next step after Intran, bringing this same design environment to standard IBM compatible PC systems.

1985 – 1990 - The Beginning

In 1985, Basit Hamid and Eric Searle founded Elixir Technologies in Los Angeles, California in the United States to develop and sell document composition capabilities, to design and run production print jobs without the requirement to program for the Xerox 9700 (and later) laser printers. The company was founded to capitalize on the convergence of the then new personal computer and the revolution occurring in high volume print which was the Intran's effective WYSIWYG tools concept, the new technologies of the IBM PC/AT and the Digital Research GEM (Graphical Environment Manager); all paved the way for Elixir's innovative product line. Elixir continued to develop and release software tools, all with graphical user interfaces, to support Xerox production print including ElixiForm in 1987, an interactive forms design tool to create and edit Xerox forms. By the end of eighties, Elixir had a working font designer (ElixiFont and the EFont Factory for raster and scalable Xerox fonts 1987-88), and image editors and transformers (ElixiGraphics 1989). In 1991, Elixir expanded to support to include the IBM production print environment as well as Xerox with the Elixir Desktop; the first full graphical interface for managing the design and format conversion process to run on a DOS-based PC that supported a hybrid print environment (both Xerox and AFP).

It redesigned the graphical interface metaphors of Xerox Star 8010 (icons, and windows) with the GEM graphics environment from Digital Research Inc. and integrated them with the IBM PCs and compatible hardware. Elixir thus played a key role in the birth of the GUI and commercial desktop publishing.

In 1988, Elixir Technologies’ products were signed on by Xerox under the Xerox brand for worldwide distribution. By 1990, Elixir Technologies was also being promoted by IBM (through a partnership agreement) and Siemens as a print industry standard.

These products are now used worldwide in over 100 countries to produce documents on high speed laser and other types of all-point addressable printers in various sectors.

In 1990 Elixir was one of the first companies to establish a software development laboratory in Eastern Europe. This office, located in Prague in the Czech Republic, has expanded to include sales and marketing activities serving all of Europe.

1990 – 2000 - Elixir Transformation Suite and Opus

In this period Elixir's products were ported to the new Microsoft® Windows® platform and the Elixir AppBuilder and several other products were added to the suite. Elixir's market share became dominant as its tools became a standard for the high volume electronic printing industry.

From 1990 through to 2003, Elixir launched applications focusing on page description language {PDL) transformation and PDL data mining. Elixir’s PageMiner and Transformation Suite could serve the needs of many organizations that required converting input files from one PDL format to an alternative PDL. In addition, this tool can be used to convert legacy print streams into other formats such as XML, CSV, indexed PDF, web presentation, archive and for use as an input file to other applications that support these formats.

PageMiner provided a GUI interface in which a user could graphically view the composed print stream to see how it would print. In the PageMiner interface the user could select any data element on the page and apply formatting and business rules, as well as, apply data processing and extraction. Extracted data could be then used in a new composition process and thus provide a way for legacy application to be easily updated and improved without touching the application code on the host system.

In 1994 Elixir Technologies launched Opus, the first GUI-based document composition system for variable data print based on Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows platform and introduced the ability for a single design to support to any output. Opus extended Elixir’s solution offering to support dynamic variable data print through the use of conditional logic to drive the format and content of the document as well as the method in which it was produced. With Opus, 100 percent of the document formatting (images, data, etc.) could be dynamically formatted based on conditional logic as could the output method including AFP, PostScript®, PDF, web delivery, Xerox print streams and others.

By this time Basit Hamid, had established another software laboratory, this time in his home country of Pakistan. As the market continued to mature, many new companies entered into the document composition race and new applications were introduced.

2001 – 2009 - DesignPro Tools

In 2003 DesignPro Tools (DPT) was developed. DPT is a collection of tools which include forms, fonts and graphic editors along with conversion tools for IBM and Xerox printing systems. DesignPro Tools was derived from one of Elixir’s earliest products, the Elixir Desktop. DPT provides a graphical interface and does not require any programming knowledge to use.

DesignPro Tools supports both Xerox and AFP proprietary print systems and allows conversion of print resources (forms, fonts, graphics) between the two environments for companies who have both Xerox and AFP printers. Users may create and edit forms, fonts, and graphics in either format and at any time convert the design and use it on either printer.

In 2003, Elixir launched Vitesse, which supports graphic design for Xerox VIPP Pro (Variable Data Intelligent Postscript Printware). Vitesse utilizes VIPP which is an open language from Xerox to produce variable-data PostScript documents.

Elixir’s document archival system, Blue Ocean, was launched in 2005 adding the ability to archive documents. It provides indexing and search capabilities for a number of formats including, AFP, Images, LCDS/DJDE, Line data/3211, Metacode, Microsoft® Office® and PDF documents. It provides library services and lifecycle management which allows for risk reduction.

By 2006, the company was moving solutions to the web and introduced the Elixir Correspondence System (ECS). ECS included document and content editing, support for distributed content creation, versioning, reviewing and approval processes.

2010 – Present - SaaS becomes Reality with Tango

Tango being demonstrated at the Elixir Technologies booth at the AIIM/On Demand show in 2010

Tango Logo

In 2010 Elixir introduced Tango, a 100 percent web-based platform able to integrate and manage the people, activities, and processes associated with creation, management, and delivery of highly personalized content with zero footprint on the client desktop. Tango provides web based modules for all aspects of the workflow including document design, data handling, business logic, and production composition and thus eliminating the need for shrink-wrapped software. Tango can be deployed as a hosted model or within a company’s infrastructure.

Tango enables customer communications and correspondence for documents, email, web, and to mobile devices and supports the workflow and activities in a unique way by providing three distinct application interface layers. The business application, the management layer and an underlying development layer used to build the business application.

Each business application represents a specific communication initiative such as marketing, customer support, or human resources and then within that, relevant correspondence types are packaged for example a sales promotion, letter, contract, or other. At the business application level, users work in an interactive query process. The steps presented are functional to a specific business process and options display dynamically based on the selections made in the previous step. This process, driven by a library of business rules, quickly combines the appropriate text, images, and data together to create the customer communication required.

Separate development modules provide the foundation for the business application functionality including template creation, data processing, business rules development, and workflow definition. Tango allows you to create business applications with simplified, straightforward screens.

A management layer sits between the business application and development foundation. This consists of administrative modules to provide control for system access, task assignment, workflow monitoring and reporting, and to establish the rules related to how content is managed and used across the various business applications; all of which can be done from any computer or device with the appropriate log-in credentials.

Tango Layers

Tango is a collaborative customer communication platform able to integrate and manage the people, activities, and processes associated with creation, management, and delivery of highly personalized content.Tango facilitates customer communication (document, email, web page,mobile device), by providing three distinct application interface layers.

Tango Business Applications

Each business application represents a specific communication initiative such as marketing, customer support, or human resources and then within that, relevant correspondence types are packaged for example a sales promotion, letter, contract, or other. At the business application level, users work in an interactive query process. The steps presented are functional to a specific business process and options display dynamically based on the selections made in the previous step. This process, driven by a library of business rules, quickly combines the appropriate text, images and data together to create the customer communication required.

Development Layer Overview

Separate development modules provide the principal foundation for the business application functionality including template creation, data processing, logic, production and delivery, and project definition. Applications created here are made available as Tango business applications with simplified, straightforward screens.

Management Layer Overview

A management layer provides tools that span both the business application and development foundation. They consist of administrative modules to provide control for system access, task assignment, workflow monitoring and reporting, and to establish the rules related to how content is managed and used across the entire system (multiple business application); all of which can be done from any computer or device with the appropriate log-in credentials.

Access to each of these layers and the specific modules within is controlled at the user level so individuals may have access to any combination of modules and layers based on their roles and responsibility.

External links

• Digibarn - "A Brief Telling of the Elixir Story"
• Elixir DesignPro Tools for Windows page
• Elixir Technologies Corporation
• Elixir Tango