The deal gives First Edge production facilities in Milwaukee, Phoenix and now Atlanta to go along with sales offices San Diego, Chicago and New York.

In an interview with PrintWeek, First Edge president Bobby Kraft explained the addition of Print1 Direct will boost his company's ability to roll out cost-effective multichannel campaigns across the country. "They have both digital and offset but it's much more of a digital based operation," Kraft said of Print1 Direct. "They're really known throughout the Atlanta region for digital business to business production."

Kraft said he anticipated the acquisition will not trigger layoffs at Print1 Direct, noting, "They're running a nice business and the opportunity that presented itself was to add our technology and our software and open our platform to their manufacturing facility - we'll as integrate them into our manufacturing plants across the country."

Though the move boosts its print production capability, Kraft suggested First Edge's focus will continue to be more on complex data management.

"What we really see, quite frankly, is a bit of a race in the data management space," he added.

"We have our own server farms to manage extremely complex data streams that are coming from Fortune 500 insurance providers, healthcare, banks and financial institutions as well as large clients in the education and manufacturing sectors.

"The ability for us to get in and write and develop our own code and manipulate the data appropriately to drive the highest results for our clients, either increasing the ROI for our campaigns or help them manage their data more efficiently - that's what we see as the key to driving print. Print must augment the technology."

He continued, "We don't go into companies as a printer, we don't go into companies as a mail house - we don't go into them as anything other than a true solutions provider."

A large portion of Print1 Direct's client is based in the Atlanta area, but does include Fortune 1000 and enterprise clients. "It certainly does provide the opportunity to cross sell our services," Kraft said.

Kraft added that with the acquisition giving them three print facilities, First Edge will now be better able to execute national, time-sensitive, short-run campaigns.

"It also enables the ability to cut shipping costs because we can keep all the shipping on the ground," he added. "A lot of times companies - when they're shipping short run, short-turnaround, across the country campaigns - have to incur all types of overnight shipping costs. So this enables us to extend short-run, high-volume to all types of corporation across the country."