Well, there's interesting. Here we are wondering when there will be some sort of announcement from Heidelberg about its plans to return to the digital market, and up pops Manroland with a deal to do the very same thing with Océ.

Shall be watching closely to see how this pans out. A decade or so ago Manroland had a similar partnership deal going on with Xeikon - remember the DICOpress range? - an arrangement that foundered after Xeikon ran out of money and entered the Belgian equivalent of Chapter 11 in 2002.

At the time Manroland was mooted as a potential purchaser, and was actually a preferred bidder at one point, but things didn't work out that way and Punch stepped in instead. The following year the OEM deal between the pair crumbled.

Thus, Manroland's ambitions to rapidly build a €200m digital business didn't quite go accordingly to plan. No doubt the lessons learned during that past foray have been taken into account with this new Océ deal. And, as has been demonstrated with numerous other ventures, including the expensive Heidelberg/Kodak collaboration on the NexPress, timing is everything when it comes to hitting a sweet spot in the market.

The Océ inkjet kit that is the subject of this new arrangement is itself the result of a partnership with Miyakoshi. It's easy to think about it as being mostly relevant in the billing/transpromo space, but the JetStream range is also targeted at direct mail, newspaper and book printers.

So next time an existing Manroland customer is looking at digital inkjet, just as Communisis did when buying its HP T300, Manroland will at least have a foot in the door with something of its own, or rather, Océ's, to offer.