EFI has announced the acquisition of privately-held alphagraph team GmbH ("Alphagraph ").
Alphagraph, with headquarters in Essen, Germany, is a provider of MIS/ERP (management information systems and enterprise resource planning) software products for the printing industry, including Prinance, Printy and Primus. While financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, the acquisition is not expected to be material to EFI's 2011 results.
Despite the challenging environment EFI has shown solid growth in Europe, and with the addition of Alphagraph we are accelerating our investment in staffing levels and footprint in the European market, said Paul Cripps, managing director of EFI EMEA. "With the Alphagraph team and customers, we will continue to build upon the strength of our business, and the support we make available to our increasing number of customers in Europe."
Alphagraph is very enthusiastic about the opportunity to join EFI, as they have demonstrated that they are the clear leader in business process automation software for printing companies," said Norbert Hotze, Founder of Alphagraph. "It is a natural fit for our client base and we look forward to introducing them to EFI's overall support structure and portfolio of solutions."
Alphagraph will become part of EFI's Software Applications (APPS) portfolio, which generated 44% revenue growth during the first 9 months of 2011."
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.
"I am very excited by the addition of Alphagraph and their team to EFI. We welcome Karsten Thomas, now Director EFI Alphagraph and all our new Alphagraph partners. This relationship will allow us an even greater focus on providing the industry a strong and long term print management product portfolio with the benefit of the Alphagraph team, one of the strongest teams of development, support and implementation staff in Europe", said Marc Olin, GM of EFI's Software Applications ("APPS") business unit.
Alphagraph solutions including Prinance, Printy, Web.Connect, Shop.Connect, Kreativ.Connect and Stratos i. Point will continue to be developed, supported and sold for existing customers, but no longer be offered to new customers. EFI will continue to focus on the following MIS/ERP systems for sales to new clients going forward:
• EFI Monarch - for larger, single and multi-plant operations looking for full workflow automation with specialization in publication, book, direct mail, transactional and large commercial printing operations
• EFI Radius - for labels, folding cartons and flexible packaging operations
• EFI Pace - for mid-market digital, offset, hybrid, wide format and specialty printing operations
• EFI PrintSmith - for on-demand, copy shop and small commercial operations
• EFI Digital StoreFront -Customizable Internet-Based eCommerce/Web-to-print Platform
EFI will continue to provide long-term support for customers using Alphagraph for many years into the future. Georg Hollenbach, Managing Director of EFI GMBH will assume the Managing Director role for Alphagraph going forward.
Alphagraph products are currently used in over 6,000 facilities in 15 countries.
EFI
www.efi.com
