Marc Olin, senior vice president and general manager, EFI productivity software division says, “We are pleased to bring OPS into our growing web to print customer community and combine our good offerings in the market. EFI has seen web to print expand and become a standard way of doing business around the world.”
EFI sees the acquisition with great potential to expand its offerings in web to print and further leverage its integrated workflow with its MIS systems and Fiery controllers.
OPS software will become part of EFI’s productivity software portfolio and it intends to continue to offer both Digital StoreFront and OPS products to the market.
Mark McGowan, CEO, OPS told Australian Printer, “EFI is dedicated to providing superior products and services to our partners in the print industry. As part of that dedication, we continually review our progress to ensure that we are providing the industry-leading solutions to our customers in each segment we serve.”
McGowan says, “EFI is already a market leader in the MIS market segment, and we now also looking to become a leader in the web-to-print market segment. The Web-to-Print market is currently both growing substantially (12-14 per cent annually) and highly fragmented. With our market strength, EFI is the only player with both the resources and experience to be the leader. We believe today, with Digital StoreFront and related products, EFI is the largest solution provider on the market (by revenue), but still represents a small piece of the overall market. The potential for growth is quite large.”
He says “The OPS team and I are excited about joining EFI, a leader in MIS/ERP and eCommerce software for print. We look forward to sharing our expertise in the areas of web to print, cross media marketing, and variable date printing to enhance EFI products. We are committed to continuing to provide the next generation of web to print and marketing solutions.”
EFI has started a project team to build the longer term consolidation project, where the key components of EFI OPS will be integrated into a unified web-to-print platform with Digital StoreFront.
McGowan says, “Customers of EFI OPS and EFI Digital StoreFront will both have a seamless path onto the new solution and customers that remain on maintenance will be charged no upgrade fee to move to this combined solution. We expect the unification work to extend along an 18-36 month timeline. During that time period, we will continue the planned product releases for both EFI Digital StoreFront and EFI OPS and continue selling both products in the marketplace both direct and through our reseller channels.”
In addition, EFI intends to integrate the OPS platform into its Fiery digital front ends so that OPS clients can be connected to the wide range of Xerox, Ricoh , Canon, Konica Minolta, and other Fiery driven printers available.
“To be clear, EFI will continue to fully offer, support and develop EFI OPS, along with continued support for EFI Digital StoreFront. In addition, those customers with EFI MIS solution will now have an option to integrate OPS into your EFI Pace or EFI Monarch MIS applications and this will be supported with the same depth of integration we support with our Digital StoreFront product.” McGowan concluded.
