Arazi shot to prominence in the print industry after a pioneering, 20-year career as the founder, president and CEO of the first Israeli high-tech firm, the Scitex Corporation. As one of the quartet of prepress companies, along with Crosfield, Hell and Screen, that changed the face of print in the 1970s and 80s with their electronic page make up systems, Scitex achieved huge worldwide sales.
Arazi, regarded widely as the father of Israel’s high-tech industry for his role with Scitex, worked with NASA in the late 1960s while studying at MIT, developing the camera used to broadcast the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. He left Scitex at the height of its success in 1988, just before high priced prepress world came crashing down with the uptake of the Apple Mac. Scitex was then sold to Creo which was then bought by Kodak.
After leaving Scitex, Arazi founded his own company EFI (electronics for imaging), which produced a true breakthrough, the Fiery rip: the print industry’s first colour server. It enabled monochrome photocopiers produced by the likes of CXanon, Ricoh, Fuji Xerox and Konica Minolta to become colour digital printers with some degree of colour fidelity. Immediately embraced by the world’s digital colour print manufacturers, Fiery remains the de facto rip in most digital printers, with more than 20 million in operation globally.
In 1992, Arazi completed an initial public offering for EFI and two years later, Fortune magazine named EFI the fastest-growing public company in the USA. EFI has grown to more than $652m in annual revenues and manufactures award-winning digital colour printing workflow products, MIS and ERP systems and inkjet printing technologies.
Guy Gecht, the current CEO of EFI says, “We are all deeply saddened by the passing of our founder and one of the most influential leaders in the history of our industry, and we send our sympathies and condolences to Efi’s family. Though no longer with us, Efi’s spirit of entrepreneurship, brilliant creativity and love of innovation will always remain at EFI.”
