Digital Print Industry Leaders Agree to AFP Open Standards Initiative

Industry Consortium to Join in Unparalleled Collaboration Effort for Printing of Customer Communications

BOULDER, CO—August 30, 2006—IBM announced that a key open standards initiative for the digital print industry has reached a major milestone. A majority of the AFP Color Consortium, a 28-company standards body, has approved IBM’s proposal to fully open the development of the Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) architecture. With this agreement, the members of the consortium will collaboratively develop all extensions to the AFP architecture, which is used by clients worldwide for the high speed printing of bills, statements and other customer communications. The consortium has already jointly published key color components of the architecture. Today’s agreement means that high speed black and white printing will also be included in the open standards initiative.