Jan Palmen is senior vice president of Innodata Isogen and heads the company’s publishing practice. He is responsible for building and sustaining relationships with many of the company's leading publishing clients. Prior to joining Innodata Isogen, Jan was COO of SPI Technologies, Inc. (1995-1998). He also spent three years with United Dutch Publishers as the head of sales and production, and two years with a global management consultancy company as a strategic consultant.

Jan holds an MBA in marketing, economics and logistics management, and a BBA in economics and marketing.

ValueNotes: Do you see growth in any particular service line in the publishing sector in the near future?
Jan: Our eBook business is likely to continue to expand as demand in the consumer and trade market explodes. We believe that the eBooks revolution will ultimately converge with a potentially larger and more sweeping change in publishing. eBooks will morph into ePublishing, and redefine product boundaries, functionality and feature sets. It’s going to be quite exciting.

Perhaps more importantly, we’re seeing strong and sustained growth in editorial and authoring services. Our clients are asking us to help them produce richer content, while reducing its overall cost.

ValueNotes: How critical is publishing services to your company given the number of areas you are currently operating in?
Jan: We have geared our entire infrastructure – people, processes and technology – to help publishers meet their content creation and publishing challenges. While we’re focused on publishing, we’re exploring ways of leveraging our assets to help other types of companies. We now provide technical writing and editing services to a number of Fortune 1000 companies. Another area where we’re planting some seeds is medical and healthcare support services.

ValueNotes: What are your expansion plans for the next 4 quarters?
Jan: Our clients are really in the driver’s seat here. They’re asking us to get more deeply involved in the operations, taking on progressively more complex activities. The result is closer relationships that generate greater value for us both.

Innodata Isogen has racked up three consecutive years of record revenue, almost doubling our client base in that period. We’ve expanded our service offering along the content supply chain, moving from production services (such as data conversion and composition) to editorial and authoring services to IT services.

As we continue to grow our eBook business over the next year, we anticipate an increasing portion of our revenue will result from editorial services, authoring services and content origination.

At the same time, we’re also expecting to expand our ITO footprint, as our clients ask us to help them overcome the particular challenges at the intersection of content and technology.

Though our organic growth has been rather dramatic, we continue to look carefully at acquisitions if we believe they can bring value to our clients and our shareholders.

ValueNotes: We have seen a lot of consolidation in the publishing industry – where do you see this going?
Jan: Consolidation and fragmentation are inherent in the sector’s business cycle. But our clients are resilient and adaptive. What’s more, new companies – not to mention, new technologies – continually enter the market and change the game. It’s an exciting time, ripe with possibility for bold companies that chart a thoughtful course – with Innodata Isogen.

ValueNotes: Do you expect the role of the service provider to change – from a ‘vendor’ to a ‘partner’?
Jan: It has already changed. Our clients are asking us to get involved earlier in the product development process and to take on greater responsibilities for product manufacturing and delivery. Indeed, with increasing frequency, they are asking us to deliver products directly to their customers.

Many of the in-house costs that historically resulted from extensive client intermediation – project and vendor management costs, quality assurance costs and the like – have been shifted to us, resulting in Innodata Isogen having more holistic responsibilities for outcomes.