EFI sells off MIS to Symphony Tech Group

The new company has around 4,000 customers globally, mostly medium and enterprise-sized printers involved in packaging, commercial print, mailing, and display graphics.

Gaby Matsliach, who led the EFI productivity software division and has now become CEO of the new company, commented, “This strategic step in becoming an independent company enables us to bring greater value to our customers, as well as the packaging and print industries overall, by extending our collaboration with key industry technology players. We will of course continue to collaborate closely with our friends at EFI. In addition, we will accelerate investments in our technology advancements and modernization, in our level of partnership with customers, and in driving global organic and inorganic growth.”

Carrie Klepzig, senior director of global marketing and business development, told me, “One of the things that excites us the most about this new chapter in our journey is the ability to be laser focused on bringing transformational technology to the packaging and print industries and to our current and future customers. That will remain our primary focus.”

Eproductivity Software has also announced that Marc Olin has joined its board as executive chairman. Olin was the founder and CEO of PrintCafe, which was acquired by EFI in 2003 and became the foundation of EFI’s productivity software division. Olin went on to lead the division within EFI before becoming chief financial officer of EFI. He commented: “I am impressed with the progress the business has made in recent years and I am excited to be coming back to where I spent most of my career – transformational software technology for the printing and packaging industries.”

As already noted, eProductivity Software is owned by private equity company Symphony Technology Group, which has built up a portfolio of around 35 companies in the data, software, and analytics fields. This is entirely separate from Siris, the private equity firm that acquired EFI for $1.7 billion back in 2019.

The sale should leave EFI free to concentrate on its industrial inkjet business, which is mainly centred around the Nozomi platform for printing corrugated packaging, and the Reggiani textile printing business. EFI has said that it is investing in R&D to strengthen its position in its core markets while entering new categories – including the development of technologies to address new applications for the textile space and for packaging.

Jeff Jacobson, EFI’s CEO and Executive Chairman, commented, “We are making significant investments to continue to be the clear leader in the Packaging & Corrugated, Display Graphics, Textile, and Building Materials/Decor markets.”

Jacobson added, “The potential of the high-growth industrial inkjet markets is the impetus for us to accelerate our investments in market-leading products and services that drive the analog-to-digital transformation. Industrial inkjet imaging is one of the greatest opportunities I have seen in my 35 years in this industry.”

In my view, it does make sense for EPS to split the productivity software business into a separate company that can approach customers independent of any press or hardware vendor. However, it would be more reassuring if EPS could demonstrate some plans to expand beyond its core print and packaging markets, perhaps to develop productivity software for the digitally-printed textile market, or even for the 3D-printing space.

The picture is less clearcut when it comes to EFI. On the one hand, EFI will be able to invest more effort into the packaging and industrial print markets as Jacobson noted and so can reasonably expect to see further growth in these areas.

But it’s hard to imagine that some of these areas would not also benefit from some of the software tools and know-how that are now tied up with the eProductivity Software. Equally, I think that the pandemic has demonstrated that data services and software licensing are a useful way of generating revenue and being less reliant on hardware sales. Interestingly, the EFI website still lists all the productivity software just as before though the links do go to the new company.

It’s possible that EFI can cater for some of this through its Fiery front ends.  Toby Weiss, chief operating officer and general manager for the Fiery division, commented: “Working in close consultation with our partners, the investments we are making in the future of Fiery technology will foster even stronger solutions – including leading-edge cloud offerings through an EFI IQ suite of products that continues to help customers achieve new levels of automation, accuracy and profit potential in digital printing.”

Jacobson also referenced Fiery, commenting, “We have never been more excited about the opportunity in the industrial inkjet markets and our ability to leverage Fiery, the leading Digital Front End (DFE) technology for digital colour printing, to continue to drive the analog-to-digital transformation in all high-value segments of imaging – while increasingly serving new adjacencies including e-commerce, direct-to-garment, and other rapidly growing segments.”

It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on EFI, and what it does with the money from this sale and what new technologies might emerge. Hopefully the company’s Connect user conference, which starts later this month on 17 January, will shed more light on this. In the meantime, you can find more details from efi.com and from eproductivitysoftware.com.