Seagull Scientific’s BarTender Launch Conference

On Monday 8th April 2019 Seagull Scientific launches the latest version of their popular and powerful BarTender label design software. On Thursday 4th April they invited a select group of partners to hear the latest news and meet the Seagull senior management. Here’s what I learned…

BarTender 2019 is more streamlined and has some minor features added.

Its user interface has been tweaked. Everything looks pretty similar – so users of older versions will feel at home. It’s only when you start adding text or other features that you stop and realise the capabilities are different.

BarTender price and licencing has changed – Gone is the basic edition and now there are three editions – Pro, Automation and Enterprise. Now you pay for the software licence and an additional fee for each printer you intend to print to. There is a free version of BarTender, but interestingly Seagull hasn’t said a word about it.

Support is improved but charged for. Now there are target response times when you contact Seagull, but you pay for maintence and support. The first year of maintence is bundled in the software price, but you need to pay extra for subsequent years. The good news is that maintence also means you get upgraded to the latest version of the software. The bad news is that you won’t be able to buy additional printer licences unless you have maintenance cover.

What else did I learn?

Fingerprinting Products

Harold Boa, Seagull’s CEO, talked of ‘fingerprinting’ products – uniquely identifying each and every product with a 2D barcode. When you scan it with an app (it seems Amazon may be working on such apps) you can see it’s a genuine product, giving you confidence in the brand.

For brand owners it means their customers can check the item hasn’t been counterfeited or sold through unauthorised channels. Customers can check information not printed on the labelling and product recalls can be done in a much more targeted way.

Harold Boa, Seagull Scientific's CEO — Harold Boa, Seagull Scientific’s CEO, at the BarTender 2019 Partner day.

Micro branding opportunities

Boa believes there is a great opportunity for printing ultra short run printing job. Personalised bottles for a wedding and such like.

BarTender in the Cloud.

The Seagull CEO explained the company’s moves towards putting BarTender in the cloud. He recognised the importance of Cloud based software and told us how ‘under the hood’ BarTender was having the foundations included, for more Cloud based functionality.

Seagull Scientific’s EMEA Sales Director, David Parras, described where BarTender offered real benefit to organisations: where there was a great need for compliant labels and where organisations had to manage many different label formats.