IBS International Business Systems has appointed Mike Irving to the position of Vice President of IBS Publishing. Mike’s main responsibilities will be the strategic planning for the publishing vertical within IBS and the management of the overall global marketing, development and support of the IBS Publishing solution, Bookmaster.
IBS Group has established IBS Publishing as a major vertical within the company, and intends to be the leading service provider to the publishing industry worldwide. Mike has the publishing industry knowledge and the skills necessary to make this happen.
As the Vice President of IBS’ Publishing vertical, Mike will continue to focus on building a network of publishing specialists within each major region around the world that can sell and support customers locally.
According to Mike, IBS has already established regional centres of excellence in the UK, USA and Australia, as well as developing resources in Sweden and Iberia. IBS needs to ensure that these centres have competent staff to support any new and current customers.
IBS is working with IBS offices around the world to ensure that they attain the appropriate training and knowledge of the IBS Bookmaster product, to be able to offer it to their respective markets. IBS has already doubled the number of publishing consultants worldwide since the beginning of 2006.
There has been a huge amount of interest in the IBS Bookmaster product around the world, particularly in the US and Europe, and IBS has already welcomed 4 new customers in the US this year, with its first new IBS Bookmaster customer in Europe set to follow by the end of the year. IBS is also continuing to strengthen its strategic partnerships with the large multinational publishers such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill.
From a product point of view, IBS plans to continually improve IBS Bookmaster as has been done in the past. The publishing specific system has a huge advantage, as it started with a strong base of tremendous book distribution functionality and then breed solutions such as editorial and book production and royalties functionality were developed and integrated into the system.
Additional areas such as business intelligence, e-Commerce and CRM make IBS Bookmaster a complete integrated solution for publishers and book distributors.
IBS continues to look to the future, and is looking at many issues such as rights and licensing management and RFID. IBS is also collaborating with large international printers to look for supply chain improvements and options around digital asset management, as well as looking at how to implement book industry standards.
IBS Bookmaster was developed by an Australia company, TMS Tailor Made Systems, and was acquired by IBS in 2005. Mike initially joined TMS in 1999 and moved to the UK this year to lead the expansion of IBS Bookmaster into Europe. Mike has solid expertise and experience in the publishing industry, both as a publisher and a book retailer in South Africa and Australia, prior to joining the company.