The outlook of the Kingdom's print industry is very promising, as demonstrated by the 2009 Alwan Event held at the Hilton Jeddah on Monday. Maher El-Ajou, CEO El-Ajou Group Trading Company, unveiled the transformation happening in the copying and printing industry - the changing customer needs, adding that his company is “always ready to meet those growing expectations.” Under the slogan “Experience the Power of Color” Alwan Jeddah is an event that reflects the impact of color in business communications. Canon's “Image Printer” catched everyone's attention not because it costs around SR1 million, but because of the technologial advacement it features, like printing 70 copies of full-color A3 size paper per minute. Alwan is a series of event planned by Canon in collaboration with its regional distributors. El-Ajou's strength in the business will add further value to standard propositions from Canon, he said. The event is classified in to four zones, each zone representing a different level of document efficiency, which can be fully integrated and customized by customer level. Zone 1 is for digital and large format printing zone, showing production excellence integrated with output management and full pre and post job accounting systems. Zone 2 is for office zone, which reflects a ideal office environment converting conventional document distribution in a clearly defined and controlled document system. Zone 3 is the document archiving & Imaging systems. Integrated with the other zones, a complete set of integrated document archival and retrieval systems are presented. Zone 4 is Enterprise Printing System which features network printing systems available for to reshape the enterprise printing strategies. In an interview, Maher looked at the sweeping changes happening in the color digital printing market that has created a hike in color page volumes in the Kingdom. “We were always seeing it coming, one of the reasons being transformation of the traditional color units to professional color systems meeting diverse office and production environments,” he added. Canon, said Nasssim Dissi, El-Ajou Group's manager, continues to be the leading brand in the copier, printer industry and currently holds 28-29 per cent of the local market. “During the next digital printing decade, the technologies (we presented) will make our lives richer, more connected, more productive, more efficient, more responsive,” the CEO of El
