Cascade Systems International Ltd, the holding company created by the merger of Cascade Systems Ltd, the Needham Market, Suffolk, publishing systems integration and software development house, and US-based Cascade Systems Inc, has secured capital investment to the tune of $1.4m. As reported (CI No 2,481), some of the money has come from Adobe Ventures, a venture capital partnership formed by Adobe Systems Inc and Hambrecht & Quist Group, the rest from Jarrold & Sons Ltd, of Norwich: they put up $1m and $400,000 respectively. The British company will use the funding to accelerate product development plans and become more involved in the developing technology of Acrobat. Cascade was set up at IPEX 1993 by ex-Hyphen development team leader Richard Patterson, who launched the first PostScript Raster Image Processor ‘clone’ at IPEX 1988. The company aimed itself at three areas: pre-press production management and control systems to enable publishers to better manage their pagination process; development of electronic storage and delivery systems for the emerging data communication and storage technologies of Adobe Acrobat, CD-ROM and optical disk; and the integration of third party image capture, page output and data communication systems. On forming itself, Cascade launched DataFlow and ImageFlow. DataFlow, a page element production management and tracking system, gives publishers the location and status of any page or page element, be it scanned or created image, text element or display ad, during the production process. The status of partially paginated pages or page elements can be displayed on an Apple Computer Inc Macintosh colour-coded graphical client dialogue in Adobe Acrobat format. It is based on a Sybase relational database and will run on either Macintosh or Windows clients. ImageFlow offers the control and management of image systems and the ability to store, transmit and image page elements in a wide range of digital formats. High resolution image files can be scanned from the desk-top or high-end scanners and stored onto a central or distributed file-server prior to Open Pre-press Interface substition at the output stage. Soft proofs
And low resolution view-file generation is automatic from a number of different file formats. More recently, the company has also launched ViewFlow and more recently ReproFlow, and is planning to launch a new library system later in the year. ReproFlow is a scaled down version of DataFlow aimed at repro houses and bureaux, for workflow and production management within digital pre-press environments. Cascade has bundled together a six-user ReproFlow system with a Hewlett Packard optical disc jukebox for UKP20,000. It is built around Macintosh and Sparc hardware, uses a relational database so customers can locate any file within a pre-press system. ViewFlow enables production managers to check the status of jobs flowing through the pre-press system and the status of each individual page-build towards completion, from the company’s DataFlow and ImageFlow, data management applications. ViewFlow also includes Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Corp’s Excel and Object Linking and Embedding, so the page-build status can be viewed through an Excel graph or an Adobe colour coded page-plan and soft proofs produced, Cascade says.
