NEWS – For Immediate Release
FREMONT, California -- July 21, 2014 -- EFI™ (Nasdaq:EFII), a world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, today announced that it has acquired DirectSmile GmbH, an award-winning provider of software solutions for cross media marketing automation. Based in Berlin, DirectSmile invented image personalization in 2001 and today makes media personalization and automation software that streamlines sophisticated marketing and production tasks for corporations, agencies and printing companies. DirectSmile’s technologies extend EFI’s offerings and will give customers expanded, fully integrated capabilities with data-driven digital print, web, e-mail, social media and mobile marketing workflows. While financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, it is not expected to be material to EFI’s Q3 or full year 2014 results. DirectSmile employees, including co-founders and former principals Christoph Schacht and Christoph Clermont, have joined EFI’s Productivity Software Web2Print Solutions Group.
“Web to print is one of the fastest-growing parts of the printing and marketing software segment,” said Gabriel Matsliach, senior vice president and general manager, EFI Productivity Software. “This acquisition gives us the ability to further address this segment with additional, best-in-class variable data and cross media technologies. DirectSmile’s customer base, which has a large proportion of agencies, corporate marketing departments and designers, is also highly complementary to EFI’s core client base, which opens the door to new growth opportunities.”
“EFI has always been a top industry innovator, and we have partnered with EFI on many past projects to help customers bring more value to their variable data and cross media marketing efforts,” said Christoph Schacht, DirectSmile’s co-founder. “EFI is the worldwide leader in digital printing workflow and being a part of the EFI portfolio is a great opportunity to expose our technology to many more companies. DirectSmile customers will be able to achieve higher levels of automated, targeted marketing success as well as gain important new efficiencies through integrations with EFI Fiery® digital front ends, EFI Digital StoreFront and other products.”
EFI will continue to develop, sell and support DirectSmile products as standalone software for the agency, enterprise and print industry markets. DirectSmile’s technology also will be integrated into EFI’s web to print and eCommerce offerings, EFI Digital StoreFront®. EFI is currently incorporating DirectSmile technology into a new variable-data printing product that will make its debut at the Graph Expo tradeshow, September 28-October 1.
For additional information about EFI, visit www.efi.com or contact 800-875-7117.
About EFI
EFI™ (www.efi.com) is a worldwide provider of products, technology and services leading the transformation of analog to digital imaging. Based in Silicon Valley, with offices around the globe, the company’s powerful integrated product portfolio includes digital front-end servers; superwide, wide-format, label and ceramic inkjet presses and inks; production workflow, web to print, and business automation software; and office, enterprise and mobile cloud solutions. These products allow users to produce, communicate and share information in an easy and effective way, and enable businesses to increase their profits, productivity, and efficiency.
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