In January, EFI held its annual customer conference, EFI Connect, at the Wynn in Las Vegas. This was the first time we had attended an EFI customer conference and it was enlightening. Of course, I’ve followed EFI for many years and because of my own tunnel vision and focus on their Fiery products, particularly in the office, there was a time when I questioned their future relevance in the lower end of the markets that I report on.
Ten years and millions of dollars in acquisitions later, I entered a packed show. I really wasn’t expecting this many people (1,500) when I walked through those doors. It was also amazing to see so many partners under one roof, such as Canon, Kodak, Xerox and many others.
While controllers are still a big part of who EFI is, today it’s a piece of a much bigger puzzle.
EFI Connect is an annual show in Las Vegas where their customers can come see a great deal of EFI’s technology all in one place, through partners and their own exhibits. This year’s show was the largest they’ve had in terms of attendance and they had nearly 200 individual break-out sessions, panels, keynotes and more over the course of the week covering all kinds of topics. This is a high touch event and EFI had over 100 product and business experts at the show to provide training and information about EFI’s products and services.
During the initial presentation, EFI CEO Guy Gecht listed the five things EFI is betting on:
• Automation
• Big data
• The imaging of things
• Digital printing
• Long-term partnerships
The biggest moment of the event occurred while Guy was giving his keynote; Benny Landa of Landa Nanography snuck on stage for a supposed impromptu fireside chat with Gecht.
Before the interruption from Landa where they broke the news about the partnership between EFI and Landa, an announcement seen by about a million people via Twitter all over the world within a matter of hours, Gecht discussed EFI and where they’re going. He talked about big data and how critical it is to business, digital printing and inkjet technology. Gecht says, “The true beauty of inkjet is that it’s printing onto things without touching them.” Indeed, you get the feeling that Gecht looks at the world around him as a giant canvas begging for EFI ink.
Ink represents an interesting number of possibilities. While the world mourns the impending doom and demise of the print industry, EFI and others understand that it’s just certain kinds of printing that’s going to drop off. Other types of printing are popping up everywhere.
For example, EFI is now in the ceramic printing market, where they can do things to inexpensive ceramics to make them look identical to much more costly grades. Or better yet, ceramics can be custom designed. Imagine seeing subtle company logos in the background of custom tiles.
EFI is much more of a technology company than I had previously thought. Spending $150 million/year on R&D, Gecht justifies this hefty annual expenditure saying, “In our industry, standing still is not an option.”
Over the last year, EFI did not stand still, acquiring four companies. They participated in about 100 trade shows in 2013 and they’re in the process of building a lot of mobile capability into their many platforms. They clearly feel mobile is a huge opportunity. When asked about 3D printing, EFI appears to be mulling it over but in no hurry to jump in.
Thinking from the dealer and print reseller channel perspective, EFI still offers an excellent opportunity in the graphics market. But, while embedded print controllers have all but done away with Fiery controllers in the traditional office print environment, my personal experience suggests there might still be a good opportunity to put some more profit in a deal by adding a Fiery controller on top of that Canon, Ricoh, Konica, or Sharp MFP.
Think I’m wrong? The next time you have some time to kill in your demo room, print out the annual report PDF of any large company. These files are often filled with graphics and contain 40-60 pages (or more). They are also often upwards of 50 MB. Send that to your business-class MFPs and watch what happens. Most brands will choke trying to print using their PCL or a clone PostScript driver. The job will take forever to print and in some cases, you may even find the registration is way off and the images have shifted around.
You may say, “So what? Who prints PDFs like that?” You never know if you don’t ask and if they ever print heavy files like a 20+ MB PDF or PPT, it can create bottlenecks at the printer or simply result in a lot of end-user frustration.
I do think there is more opportunity to put Fiery controllers in the office than there has been in the past and Fiery would do well to help dealers understand how these products can help them drive revenue beyond the graphics market. File sizes continue to grow and getting the customer to buy-in that they need a Fiery all but ensures an A3 sale over an A4 device – and we all know how much more GP is in an A3 sale compared to an individual A4 MFP, right?
This trip was an eye-opener. There is a lot more going on at EFI than I knew about and they’re an impressive company. There was a time where I expected them to exit our world and move into different directions but they’re not going anywhere. They’ll be a graphics market leader for years to come and their technologies will continue to drive ink jet printing to an entire new level. And who knows, maybe they’ll even push back into the office.
