“We look at our products as the fuel for the success for our customers’ businesses and that’s what we think about when we think about how they work and the value they can provide to users,” said Olin, who was promoted to chief operating officer on the eve of last week’s user event.

Olin kicked off his keynote presentation by highlighting the firm’s flagship Fiery digital front-end’s performance in a number of independent tests for speed, colour and complex PDF handling.

“We certainly believe if you’re driving your print engine with anything other than a Fiery then you’re missing a huge advantage to fully leverage the investment in your printer and its colour and performance capabilities,” he said.

He also detailed the firm’s commitment to R&D, highlighting the fact it employs 300 staff dedicated to software R&D alone, and also its commitment to LED curing on its top-end, wide-format presses.

However, the main focus of his presentation was to give the 1,000 customers in attendance a taster of some of the software product enhancements the company was planning to roll out over the next 12 months.

According to Olin, in May this year the company will release v15.1 of its ERP/MIS software for labels, folding cartons, flexible packaging and print, Radius, which will feature better integration with packages such as Technique CRM and PrintFlow and also SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) compliance.

In November it will release v15.2, which will further enhancements including integration with PrintStream warehouse management and Metrix imposition software.

Monarch, EFI’s ERP software, will also release a new version this year, 14.1, featuring a number of improvements requested by the Monarch User Group, such as new pricing categories for estimating and job costing, an open API to link in with various accounting packages and Windows 8 support.

A number of core modules and better localisation will also be added to the next iteration of EFI’s Pace MIS, but according to Olin the key focus will be to further improve the wide-format capabilities of Pace, as well as some basic flexo capabilities for smaller label and packaging firms.

Olin admitted that the company is still “not where it wants to be” with its browser-based PrintSmith Vision MIS package. However, he said the company would continue to improve the product, as “our primary focus will be to get a crisp release that offers a seamless transition from legacy PrintSmith”.

PrintSmith Vision improvements will also include Metrix, SmartLinc and Xpedx integration as well as an EFI Cloud hosted option.

Even though EFI only released version 7 of its Digital StoreFront (DSF) web-to-print software at Connect, featuring HTML 5, it’s already planning a number of enhancements in the first half of 2014, including improvements to SmartStores and SmartStore Builder interfaces and also the addition of Vprint templated workflows from Online Print Solutions for direct mail and native VDP applications. In the second half of the year it will also add Design Online to enable documents within DSF to be modified online as well as improved supports for bleeds, folding and cutting.

Finally, the firm’s Online Print Solutions (OPS) cross-media and web-to-print platform, which EFI acquired in 2012, will benefit from the addition of HTML5 support and some DSF modules as well as new rules-based upsell module and raft of other upgrades which, according to Olin, will be further steps towards the end game of merging DSF and OPS into a single web-to-print platform over the next few years.

Featuring more than 150 educational sessions, Olin highlighted Connect’s influence on not only customers’ strategy development, but also EFI’s product development direction through closer collaboration with its customers. He also used his 60-minute presentation to stress that the company was constantly evaluation acquisition targets to boost its customer offering.

He said that the company would continue its twin acquisition approach of adding products that plug holes in its product portfolio, like Metrix and more recently logistics package SmartLinc, and geographic or market share-driven acquisitions such as German MIS firm Lector Computersysteme and US MIS developer PrintLeader.

“We’ll continue to look at acquisitions in both these categories to continue to build on our software business,” said Olin.