First of all EFI announced it was buying Alphagraph (alphagraph team GmbH), and then HP announced its acquisition of Hiflex, another German MIS supplier. One might ask what is the attraction of acquiring an MIS company?

First of all let us look at the EFI acquisition of Alphagraph. This essentially puts the two market leaders together. EFI is the largest supplier of print MIS in the world, however most of their 12,000 plus clients are North American based. Alphagraph’s approximate 6,000 clients are predominantly European based, and mainly in small and medium sized printers. The products have been sold under a number of brand names, the best known being Prinance, the previous Heidelberg MIS system.

Heidelberg stopped selling Prinance earlier this year following the acquisition of Belgian supplier Cerm. Other Alphagraph brands include Printy and Web Connect and others. The benefits for EFI are a consolidation of all its MIS systems under one umbrella. At this stage it has to be a large umbrella as under the EFI Software Applications portfolio (APPS), EFI Monarch, EFI Radius, EFI Pace, EFI PrintSmith and EFI Digital StoreFront.

EFI state according to their press release, “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.”

The wording of the press release instantly generates the question of what does EFI really intend? It appears from this that they see the Alphagraph user base as one into which to sell the existing EFI products rather than continuing to develop the Alphagraph product range. On the Alphagraph web site EFI state they will continue with software maintenance. Obviously it is an early stage of the acquisition and as the FAQ section of the Alphagraph web site shows there are many questions still to be answered.

EFI has always been a good company at acquisitions. I have in the past commented that while they are good at acquisitions they are not good at integration of their acquisitions. The different EFI MIS systems have very different software bases and it is only around the systems peripheries that there are some common solutions. The question therefore is whether the future for Alphagraph customers will be either to stay with the current software base and in future add peripheral elements such as EFI Digital Storefront, or to replace the current system with a new EFI system? Perhaps what EFI is planning is totally new Cloud based system into which many of its worldwide clients can transition into in future.

The HP announcement is interesting in its acquisition of Hiflex. Hiflex offerings are generally aimed at the larger printers and it was one of the first MIS companies to really embrace JDF/JMF data structures. What was interesting was HP’s statement in its press release that it was acquiring Hiflex to advance its web based printing business and to extend the company’s portfolio of Cloud-based solutions.

Hiflex does, like most MIS systems, have a webshop platform to allow customers to develop storefront type applications, and it has announced it is shortly to introduce Cloud based estimating and order processing. Obviously the Cloud approach is something HP is pushing as its future but in reality it has few true Cloud based business applications at present. It may well be that Hiflex, a company that has been innovative in its previous introductions is readying a full Cloud based MIS system and this is really why HP is buying them. I wonder sometimes if what is being announced is really Cloud based or is it just applications not hosted by the user? Are we going to have a period of “Cloudwashing” as suppliers attempt to fly up to the Cloud?

What the messages coming from these two announcements may be is that MIS could be a major business driver in future as companies like EFI and HP build a whole Cloud based solutions platform that covers more than just MIS. One of the key announcements that is going to come at drupa from many suppliers is a move of certain functions into the Cloud, and no doubt MIS will be one of them. Does this potentially mean other suppliers acquiring MIS systems to build Cloud portfolios? Can we see Kodak once again going into MIS where previous they tried to introduce their EMS system? Also what about Xerox adding MIS functionality into its ACS business process outsourcing operations?

The Cloud is certainly a key future subject that will be explored at drupa. Will MIS be a part of the Cloud for the future?

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