Former Xerox chief executive will head EFI, after being brought in by private equity owner Siris as executive partner and now chief executive.

He succeeds Bill Muir who resigned citing "personal reasons" after ten months in the job. Siris bought digital workflow and printing vendor EFI - which has sales of $1 billion - for $1.7 billion in a leveraged buyout under which EFI will assume debt of about $1 billion.

Jacobson's career includes time at the top of Kodak Polychrome Graphics and then Kodak Graphic Communications, before taking over as president and chief executive of Presstek.

He joined Xerox as chief executive in 2012, but was ousted following last year's boardroom battle with shareholders Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason over a proposed merger Fujifilm, over which the Japanese giants is suing.

EFI got its name from Efi Arazi, the Israeli entrepreneur who established in in 1989, having previously founded Scitex but identified the 'writing on the wall' for conventional electronic prepress of the day with the introduction of desktop technology. Scitex was sold to Canadian CTP developer Creo and later both became part of Kodak.