Fremont, California-based EFI announces that its recent Connect event – an annual conference that draws hundreds each year to Las Vegas, drew 10 percent more pre-registered attendees than last year’s.
Connect featured more than 200 technical, sales and business management sessions, including hands-on customer labs, interactive “voice of the customer” sessions, and plenty of opportunities for attendees to network and share information.
CEO Guy Gecht, in his keynote speech, stressed the need for customers to “bet on changes in the market forces to accelerate.” Successful printing businesses need to move with the window of opportunity, he said: “You must be willing to take a risk. Doing nothing is a guarantee that you will be unsuccessful.”
This was the conference’s 10th year being held at the Wynn Las Vegas, and in honor of that Steve Wynn, chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts, was also one of the featured speakers. He inspired the audience by reminding them that no matter how good a business’s products are, it’s the people behind the business that ultimately make the difference between success and failure.
“Underneath every major business franchise is the question of, ‘Is it better,’” Wynn said. “Is their price really justified? What we’ve learned here is that only people make people happy.”
The conference also featured the debut of several new Productivity Suites, along with digital print and industrial inkjet products.
The event also featured the announcement that Melville, New York-based Canon U.S.A. is expanding its existing relationship with EFI to offer streamlined production workflow solutions enabling users to utilize the full breadth of Canon’s sheetfed, toner-based digital presses.
The latest initiative between the two companies means bringing together the PRISMAdirect order and workflow management solution, EFI’s Midmarket Productivity Suite, including the suite’s Digital StoreFront web-to-print component and Pace, its core management information system (MIS) software. This offering provides an integrated solution for print providers to help meet the business goal of increasing efficiency and profitability. This combination of solutions leverages the industry standard JDF/JMF to integrate communication throughout the workflow.
To support workflows that do not require an extensive order management solution, Canon is announcing the availability of EFI Fiery Central Solo and its compatibility to Canon’s varioPRINT 135 Series and Océ VarioPrint 6000+ Series monochrome digital presses. EFI Fiery Central Solo is an output management system designed to connect up to three printers to Fiery Central/Command WorkStation as a centralized workflow integration hub. This allows for incoming orders from Digital StoreFront or Pace to be directly routed with job information to Fiery-driven digital presses and Canon varioPRINT and Océ VarioPrint 6000+ monochrome digital presses.
Also at the Connect conference, EFI rolled out what it calls its “Imaging of Things” exchange. The exchange is an online community for its customers who are looking to connect with and share ideas with other print professionals and print buyers looking for unique and innovative applications.
The online community, which is supported and promoted by EFI, is free for customers to join and use, and they’ll be able to post photos and videos of their most creative work to share with others and, potentially, generate some new business leads. The website is located HERE
.