The planned acquisition of Radius Solutions is complementary to EFI’s other MIS software solutions for the printing industry. EFI has found an increasing intention by large packaging printers to acquire ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems for the management of their businesses, rather than mid and large scale MIS solutions like EFI’s Pace and Monarch.

EFI had found that it had lost out to Radius in a number of bids to sell MIS in this area of the market. Radius’s software is specifically targeted at the packaging and labels printing market where customers are increasingly looked at MIS products build around corporate wide bill or materials processing operations and materials management, as are found in ERP systems such as SAP.

Radius Software will be run as a largely separate division of EFI but will utilize a number of existing EFI MIS systems modules like Digital Storefront and PrintFlow. Radius will no longer sell its older systems for the commercial printing market. The Radius applications will be added to the EFI MIS applications suite of PrintSmith, Pace and Monarch and will be sold through the EFI global sales operations. At present Radius has just two sales people so this should give Radius a larger worldwide profile. Development of the Radius Solutions software will continue to be carried out in the UK. The Radius Solutions software will be shown alongside EFI’s other MIS product lines at the forthcoming Ipex exhibition.