LuraTech looks back on a successful year in 2006

Sales increased by about 50%

(Berlin) The year 2006 was a particularly successful one for LuraTech Europe GmbH. Company sales increased by about 50 percent. New customers in the USA and Europe as well as new partners contributed to the good result. In particular, the PDF/A product line that was presented this year ensured a healthy order volume at LuraTech.

In the traditional scan area, the company has already implemented numerous projects in which the benefits of PDF/A played a role, such as color and metadata support as well as full text search. Furthermore, the compression specialist won many new customers, including Deutsche Post Direct GmbH, Globus SB-Warenhaus, the printer of passports and bank notes Polish Security Printing Works (PWPW) as well as numerous cities, public utilities and municipal computing centers. In the course of the implemented projects LuraTech also developed the its focus on engineering. Customers here include ABB, Blohm & Voss, Bosch Rexroth, RWE and Züblin AG.

Also contributing to the success of the fiscal year 2006 were newly established and intensified partnerships. Thus Ratiodata recently acquired the LuraDocument PDF Software Development Kit (SDK) for .NET. This enables Ratiodata to increase the capacity of the high-performance scanning center by a million color pages a month, compressed and full-text enabled as PDF/A files.

The many years work with Océ Deutschland GmbH in the area of large-format scan compression culminated in a closer collaboration in 2006. The Océ Image Compressor - an OEM version of the LuraDocument PDF Compressor - established itself on the market with numerous license sales.

New employees were added to the development department of LuraTech. Moreover, the company built up its sector emphasis on banks and insurance companies, where PDF/A is used every day in projects for long-term archiving of files for credit or insurance at companies like Helaba or Swiss Re. Among other results was the first PDF/A user report in the world on the use of the LuraTech PDF/A solution at DAK, which had converted its internal information service with a comprehensive literature database to PDF/A.

The American subsidiary of LuraTech also experienced success in 2006, thanks to a strong demand at archives and libraries. Among other things, in collaboration with the Internet Archive, Luratech implemented a solution in which JPEG2000 images of each book are transformed using a jointly developed PDF workflow with LuraDocument products to yield a small, full text enabled PDF file. These can be downloaded easily and are thus available to millions of visitors on the Web site of the Open Content Alliance. The Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institute and the Missouri Botanical Garden Library have also made use of the solution.

Furthermore, the compression specialist has developed a new image and content server that enables the content of scanned books and manuscripts to be displayed quickly and efficiently on the Internet. Internet users require no additional software to search and browse the book collections. This works by first scanning the individual pages at high resolution, then transforming them without loss into ISO-compliant JPEG2000 files. These files and the associated metadata can then be accessed directly with the HTML and JPEG functions of a standard browser.

Luratech initiates the PDF/A Competence Center

LuraTech is an initiator and founding member of the recently formed PDF/A Competence Center association, which promotes the exchange of information and experience on PDF/A. The members of the PDF/A Competence Center are technically oriented and are represented in the ISO committee. They contribute actively to the advancement of the PDF/A standard. Here LuraTech's commitment has already borne a bounty of fruit; from an idea conceived in December 2005, within a year an association with 20 members developed.

Furthermore, Thomas Zellmann of LuraTech serves as the executive chairman of the PDF/A Competence Center.

"Our successful development in the fiscal year 2006 allows us to look to the coming year with a relaxed and optimistic view. We will continue to invest in development and sales to be able to offer our customers even better products and more comprehensive service. For this purpose we are specifically looking for new employees in the areas of marketing, sales and development in Germany and the USA," said the managing director Carsten Heiermann. "We will also continue to promote the topic of PDF/A enthusiastically!"