The recent announcement that EFI is to acquire Pace, one of its competitors in the MIS field has attracted a degree of comment. In recent articles in WTT Cary Sherburne has looked at this announcement and spoken also with Pace customers. The following is taken from her first article on this subject.

“Marc Olin (EFI VP responsible for MIS) explained the acquisition by saying that since PrintCafé was formed eight years ago, customers have been asking when EFI would be able to standardize on a single product to eliminate the need to code the same thing several times to update all of the products in the portfolio.  Although the company had hoped in 2000 to be able to start building a new platform, that didn’t ever transpire, and development continued on Hagen, Logic, PSI and PrintSmith.  Olin said, “Back in 2006, we saw the writing on the wall related to the existing PSI platform, built on Visual FoxPro, which Microsoft was discontinuing, and we started developing a new platform, internally called PSI-X.” Olin admitted to the crowd of some 500 attendees that over the last year or two, EFI saw increasing competition for printers in the $2 million to $25 million revenue range that would normally have been served by PSI and Logic, and because of the legacy architecture of those products, the company was in a race against time to stay competitive.  Facing a choice of increasing resources on the PSI-X project or seeking another alternative, the company began evaluating acquisition possibilities.”

For a long time I have been asking EFI why they have maintained development of all their MIS product lines, and just added some similar items around the periphery of these systems rather than building a new system with a central core that could be adapted to fit the needs of the different type of customers. I have been asking this question from soon after the initial creation of PrintCafé and long before PrintCafé was acquired by EFI. I was invited to attend the EFI Connect conference this year and speak on a panel, but I turned down the invite for two reasons. Firstly because I attended Connect in 2007 and one visit to Las Vegas every three years is more than enough for anybody, but secondly I saw little point in hearing more about minor tinkering with the different EFI MIS systems. Perhaps I should have attended as this year there was something significant to hear.