EFI is leading manufacturer now for more than twenty years in digital printing. I'm responsible at EFI for our corporate marketing team. We are working on trade-shows and events, PR and support. Our business units; one of them being VUTEk, our super wide format inkjet printers; but we are also here with many of our software applications.
Web to print, management information systems, because we're really excited to be able to printer life former to show the entire work flow that EFI can control and help our customers with.
EFI VUTEk has such a wonderful reputation in the market, how do you guys maintain such a stellar reputation?
You know, we pride ourselves very much on really putting our money into R&D, to make sure that we develop leading edge products for our customers that simply help them to be more profitable. That's, you know, what we they say in our tech line, print to win. And we want all our customers to win . For us it's all about R&D and really trying to continue to be a leading manufacturer in all of our product areas.
VUTEk obviously a very important one, but also the Fiery business that we are responsible for that we invented more than 20 years ago. So print on demand, digital printing, I think EFI has a history of putting leading technology out into the market.
I've been to your EFI VUTEk Connect event before and what an engaging leadership group that you have there. What are the dates for that this year?
So, this year we start on April 26th to the 29th.. We're expecting again more than a thousand of our costumers that come to this end user event. We have a computer lab there where costumers can not only see a product that they might already use but also the other solutions that we sell to make sure they understand the value of products that we, in a work flow can put together to really help them to optimize their print work flow.
Its an amazing show and I really recommend it to anyone in the industry that's thinking about VUTEk or is already a VUTEk customer. Frank talk to me a little about the sustainability conversation and what you think the real take-aways are and then we'll get into more opinion.
Yeah. So as I said earlier, I think we, by driving print on demand, we, right on the beginning for more than 20 years to make sure that print is only being produced in the amounts and quantities that are certainly being used to minimize waste. Now in particular talking about the VUTEk side of our business, VUTEk and actually Rastek, we are pushing now, for many years, UV printing.
And we believe that UV printing because of the very small amount of VOCs to the degree that it is non-measurable to the material that you can print on that can often be recyclable. I think we are one part of a puzzle together with our customers, print buyers, to really drive that we are getting more and more environmentally friendly when it comes to printing.
I think we are not there yet, 100%, but I think we're on a good way. When you see what we have done as one of the leading manufacturers in this industry over the last three years, moving away from solvent, moving towards UV. I think we came already a long way, but there's more work to do for all of us.
Talk to me about your overall feeling on green in this category.
Yeah, so I think that we as an industry have to compete a lot with electronic media which is considered always to be green. But I like to challenge that because I consider some of the devices that are being used to display electronic media. What happens with them once they are not being used anymore?
Who will recycle them? Will they be recycled? Do they end up in a landfill in a third world country?
I believe the print industry has some compelling reasons to be part of a greener initiative in communicating whatever is printed on material. It can be textile, so it's very light to ship. It can be a recyclable material. So, I believe, together with the print buyers and print service providers in our industry there is a lot more that can be done to really be a green offer, a recyclable offers, a sustainable offer.
But I also would like to even start earlier and say how do you get files to the print shop? Web to print being one way instead of sending a courier service around that burns gasoline. So, I think it is a long process and given that we are the pioneer in digital printing, I think we can help from web to print over our software management system to reasonable output, good UV output on recyclable material.
I think we can put a lot of on the table that the people should consider.
Well obviously, the best of the best are here at FESPA Americas. Thank you so much for talking with us Frank. For more from Frank, look to the global business forums green sustainability panel. You can catch that on FESPA.com. Once again thank you so much Frank. And we'll see you soon. Bye.
