Clare Revell led the team that launched Konica Minolta’s first colour production press onto the market. After a spell away from print, she is back – helping EFI develop its Fiery business. She spoke to Andy Knaggs.
A couple of years away from the print industry can give anyone a fresh perspective upon their return, and Clare Revell – once of Kodak Office Imaging (became part of Danka UK), then of Konica Minolta, and since February back in the industry with EFI – has noticed a difference.
‘What’s different is that there’s a lot more optimism and innovation,’ she told Digital Printer. ‘The people that are succeeding are the ones that are innovating. I’ve been to see a few printers and they don’t look like printers any more. They have a broader reach and they are moving away from commodity. The ones that are succeeding are doing things differently and engaging with their customers in a different way and adding value to the print. There is definitely more optimism and innovation. It is evolving but I think in a positive way.’
Ms Revell is the recently appointed regional sales manager for the UK and Ireland, the Nordics, the Middle East and South America, for EFI’s Fiery software, which controls a good number of the digital presses out there in the field. It is a role that mostly involves liaising with the OEM partners – the press manufacturers – but she may be known to many in the industry after seven years at Konica Minolta being responsible for moving the business into production printing.
Most recently – professionally-speaking – she has been away from the industry, managing a sales team at the Chester professional services firm Ellis Whittam, although her second child also arrived immediately prior to starting the EFI job. Of her time away from the print industry she reflects that it was a little humorous to discover that ‘the industry’ exists everywhere; that people would ask, was she from ‘the industry’. She has also realised that ‘sales people are sales people – they are the same everywhere’, she said.
Having started working for Kodak in sales in 1996 (despite her degree being in medical science), she has almost 20 years of experience in sales now. The opportunity to take production print to the UK market in 2005 was too compelling to miss out on, she went on. ‘The product was great, and I was fortunate to be given the space and time to do it. The first colour product was the KM6500, which was launched at Ipex. Day 1, there were three of us in an empty office with a flipchart. We built up the business from zero, setting up a new channel, selling direct and in-direct.
‘Printers really loved the way it was just flat, over-sized SRA3 sheets that you could do full bleed on. We found we were pushing at an open door with the printers, but we only had two engineers to start with. When I left, the revenues for hardware, solutions and maintenance were more than £20 million a year in the UK alone, and I was there for seven years.’
EFI is the next challenge up. There is a new version of Fiery due around September 2015, but Ms Revell is not at liberty to reveal any details about it. Will processing power be the key, Digital Printer asks? ‘Processing power, but also functionality,’ she replied. ‘We’ve got a Fiery dashboard which is a neat way of managing the print room. It is about efficiency and productivity as well as processing power. RIPing is of course key but it is managing the print room.’
There are, in any case, different Fiery roadmaps for each OEM that EFI works with. She points out that the company upholds a principle of investing 20% of its revenue in R&D, good times or bad, and that in May the worldwide head of Fiery is visiting Europe, with the intention of spending some time talking to customers about their needs. ‘It’s very important to make sure that we are connecting the people in the US with the end users and the market. I don’t know what comes next, but it will be very much in consultation with customers,’ she said.
The UK Fiery business is worth about $16 million and she said that there is buoyancy in all the regions she is responsible for. ‘We’ve had some very good years in the UK. The Fiery area is very successful and it will continue to grow, but it’s the other areas of the business that will help EFI become that billion dollar company (stated as an objective by EFI CEO Guy Gecht). I like that ambition. Not many companies in the print industry can show that kind of growth and ambition.’
