With Hewlett Packard’s acquisition of Indigo finally completed just days prior to Ipex, having Indigo head honcho Benny Landa and Hewlett Packard’s Bill McGlynn straddling the Harley in the style of Messrs Hopper and Fonda may well have seemed the perfect show-stopping photo opportunity for con-veying togetherness.

In reality, what the camera captured has the unmistakable look of born to be wild meets the man in the grey flannel suit – the defining moment in digital printing’s trans-ition from in your face adolescence to full-blown maturity. No one has done more than Benny Landa to further the digital printing cause over the past nine years.

Just look for a press or a front-end supplier within the established printing industry that isn’t now offering some semblance of a digital solution.

Indigo will achieve much more as a Hewett Packard brand than it ever could have as a manufacturing operation in its own right. Indeed, the epithet ‘digital’ could well in time become superfluous.

Benny Landa’s vision of a better way to produce print has always been bang on the button. The problem was that it was misdirected.

Corporate culture in the guise of Hewlett Packard will address that. Their customer base understands that print means delivery. It is, after all, a low-end activity served up by Hewlett Packard in their offices every day of the week.

The technology’s future is assured. Not so certain is that of its high profile progenitor. Could be that there’s only room on the bike for one. Or even no room for the bike at all.