I have just attended the EFI Connect conference. This is the user group meeting for the owners of Printcafe MIS systems. Around 700 people, who came from the USA, Europe and Australia, attended the event. Printcafe was acquired by EFI in 2003, and this was the first Connect event since the completion of the acquisition. It was therefore a good opportunity to assess the results of the acquisition, as well as take a look at EFI as an overall solutions supplier. What it showed was that for EFI, JDF was a very significant technology for building its ongoing future business in terms of building total solutions and integrating with other suppliers systems.

The first assessment of Printcafe was of the success of the company in the U.S. market, particularly since the acquisition by EFI. They claim over 5,000 installed systems, which in their calculation shows that almost one third of all eligible printers for an MIS system in that market have a Printcafe system. Obviously many of these are very small systems, but equally there are some very large multi-site enterprise level systems.

Printcafe as a company came together in the late 1990s at the time of the dot-com boom when all the leading MIS suppliers in the U.S. were acquired and brought under one entity. These companies were Hagan, Logic, M Data (Printsmith), nth Degree, Prograph and PSI. Following these acquisitions Printcafe really did little to consolidate the companies to generate efficiencies. The company’s value plummeted as it attempted unsuccessfully to turn itself into an online e-business organization. Its overall revenues dropped from $55 million in 1999 to $25 million in 2000. This was less than half the combined revenues of all the separate companies at the time of Printcafe’s creation. It was only later that the company changed some of its management structure and reverted to its original business approach of selling separate systems that revenue growth returned in 2001 to approach $42 million. Meanwhile, Printcafe’s share value had fallen through the floor to a tiny fraction of its value at the time of its founding, and a miniscule fraction of its value at the height of the dot-com boom. At this time Creo, its leading shareholder, made a bid to acquire the whole company.