Silicon Publishing has built a business on making documents that generate themselves, and it has been doing so at a scale that few other firms can match. The San Francisco company automates data-generated documents and images for large brands including Amazon, Disney, Google, Nike, and Royal Caribbean. Its clients use the technology to produce everything from financial statements to infographics to cruise booklets, often in multiple languages and formats.
The company's roots go back to 2000, when two people started Silicon Publishing to continue database publishing and online editing work they had done at a previous company. That company had spun off their division into a dot com vision they did not agree with, so they set out on their own. Adobe was a client and partner from day one, and Silicon Publishing selected Adobe InDesign as its core engine for document automation. It turned out to be a very good choice.
Silicon Publishing specializes in database publishing and online editing services. It has built online editing solutions for Shutterfly's photobook editor, Hallmark's greeting card editor, and Amazon's book cover creator. The company produces dynamic document and image output with what it describes as truly infinite scalability. It has benchmarked 600 documents a second, and the scale is limited only by compute resources. Some clients produce 20 million images a day.
What sets Silicon Publishing apart is expertise at the intersection of typography and automation. The company employs the creators of InDesign, including Olav Martin Kvern, who wrote a number of books including Real World InDesign and is described as the definitive world expert at InDesign automation, having created it at Adobe. Silicon Publishing says it has the largest team of InDesign developers in the world, and Adobe itself turns to the company when it needs to automate InDesign. The company does not see this as competition: in many cases it shares information and technology freely with others in the space.
For organizations that need to generate high volumes of database publishing and online editing services, Silicon Publishing offers a track record that includes some of the largest publishing solutions on earth. In 2009, the company announced Silicon Designer, an online editing solution that was extremely well-received. Millions of dollars of work for very large companies followed, and Silicon Publishing did not have enough programmers to fulfill demand. Coincidentally, Adobe had decided to let the InDesign team go: they had successfully made InDesign a monopoly. Silicon Publishing inherited the top 10 InDesign developers, met the needs of its new clients, and grew from 5 to 20 people.
The results for clients are often measured in seven figures. Royal Caribbean cited $2.4 million a year in savings when Silicon Publishing automated its cruise booklets. A large insurance company cites 6,000 hours a year in time savings and a speed increase from a week to 30 seconds in document production. Many clients save $1 million a year or more.
Max Dunn, CEO of Silicon Publishing, said the company's longevity is a point of pride. "People often tell me I'm patient, but actually I've just been very impatient for a really long time (we've been at this 26 years, and I'm ready to go another 26)," he said. "If there's one lesson from business in my 26 years growing Silicon Publishing, it's 'Never give up!'"
Silicon Publishing covers almost all vertical markets, serving any organization that requires data-generated content. It solves challenges such as multiple languages, multiple output sizes and formats, and scaling very high throughput. The company's output is infinitely scalable, and its clients range from e-commerce to entertainment to travel. With a team that includes the creators of InDesign and a track record of automating the largest publishing solutions on earth, Silicon Publishing continues to grow.