There were two interesting announcements made by major suppliers last week. These were both in the area of MIS systems for printers. First of all EFI announced it was buying Alphagraph (alphagraph team GmbH), and then HP announced its acquisition of Hiflex, another German MIS supplier. One might ask what is the attraction of acquiring an MIS company?

First of all let us look at the EFI acquisition of Alphagraph. This essentially puts the two market leaders together. EFI is the largest supplier of print MIS in the world, however most of their 12,000 plus clients are North American based. Alphagraph’s approximate 6,000 clients are predominantly European based, and mainly in small and medium sized printers. The products have been sold under a number of brand names, the best known being Prinance, the previous Heidelberg MIS system. Heidelberg stopped selling Prinance earlier this year following the acquisition of Belgian supplier Cerm. Other Alphagraph brands include Printy and Web Connect and others. The benefits for EFI are a consolidation of all its MIS systems under one umbrella. At this stage it has to be a large umbrella as under the EFI Software Applications portfolio (APPS), EFI Monarch, EFI Radius, EFI Pace, EFI PrintSmith and EFI Digital StoreFront. EFI state according to their press release, “EFI intends to integrate support and operations of Alphagraph into the existing APPS organisation, which will continue to sell the EFI PrintSmith, EFI Pace, EFI Monarch and EFI Radius software products to the industry while continuing to support the existing Alphagraph client base.” The wording of the press release instantly generates the question of what does EFI really intend? It appears from this that they see the Alphagraph user base as one into which to sell the existing EFI products rather than continuing to develop the Alphagraph product range. On the Alphagraph web site EFI state they will continue with software maintenance. Obviously it is an early stage of the acquisition and as the FAQ section of the Alphagraph web site shows there are many questions still to be answered.

EFI has always been a good company at acquisitions. I have in the past commented that while they are good at acquisitions they are not good at integration of their acquisitions. The different EFI MIS systems have very different software bases and it is only around the systems peripheries that there are some common solutions. The question therefore is whether the future for Alphagraph customers will be either to stay with the current software base and in future add peripheral elements such as EFI Digital Storefront, or to replace the current system with a new EFI system? Perhaps what EFI is planning is totally new Cloud based system into which many of its worldwide clients can transition into in future.