On December 7^th, HP announced the acquisition of print MIS provider HiFlex, serendipitously, the same day EFI announced the acquisition of German-based Alphagraph.

WhatTheyThink spoke with Jill Peters, HP’s Worldwide Press and Analyst Relations Manager, to gain more insight into HP’s strategy with this acquisition. Perhaps the most surprising aspect, not addressed in the HP release, is the fact that HiFlex was not acquired as part of HP’s Graphic Solutions Business (GSB), as one might have suspected. Rather, Peters indicates that the primary driver for the acquisition was HiFlex’s cloud-based web-to-print module. She states, “The acquisition will be reporting into the Laser Jet and Enterprise Solutions Business. The driver for the acquisition was enterprise printing solutions, not GSB.” That being said, Peters asserted that the HiFlex solutions will be available to GSB customers in the printing segment.

HP has other partnerships in the web-to-print and MIS arenas, which will continue, according to Peters, who added, “This does not change our strategy in the graphics printing business. We will continue to work with a variety of different partners, and we are not changing those relationships. In addition to those, we will now be able to offer solutions that are based on HiFlex technology to both our enterprise customers and print service providers.”