Sysdeco buys Dewar; resellers to continue with DewarView

The Aug. 28 acquisition of Dewar Information Systems Corp. by Sysdeco, the Norwegian software firm that bought 51 percent of Atex Publishing Systems Inc. in the last nine months, solidifies Sysdeco's place in the North American publishing systems marketplace.

It also caps the 25-year career of C.E. Steuart Dewar, Dewar Information's founder, principal programmer and spiritual leader.

"I was working 90 hours a week for 20 years," Dewar said shortly after signing mounds of paper transferring his company to Sysdeco. "It would kill me if I did it for another five or 10 years."

Dewar, who has a three-year contract as a consultant with Dewar Information as well as a seat on the board of directors of Sysdeco's U.S. subsidiary, Sysdeco Inc. of Salt Lake City, said that running a software business isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

"Juggling all the day-to-day aspects of the company are not what I enjoy," said Dewar. He prefers writing computer code, which now he will do for Sysdeco and others as well.

"The consulting agreement I have with Sysdeco is not exclusive," said Dewar. Any work he does for companies other than Sysdeco will be outside publishing, he said, noting his background in programming for medical systems and other industries.

Sysdeco executives aren't worried about Dewar's commitment, though they've asked for at least one-third of his time.

"He's first and foremost a professional," said J. Marlow Einlund, the president of Atex Americas and Sysdeco Inc. "He doesn't want to sell and get out."

That wasn't what Sysdeco wanted, either.

"It was important to secure the services of Steuart because of his insight into the newspaper arena," Einlund said. "We're very good friends and we hope to work well together."

Part of Dewar's time will be devoted to getting "back to customers," Einland said.

Dewar agreed: "For most people, it will look like I'm doing more, because they'll see me."

Both Einlund and Dewar said the Dewar operation based in Downers Grove, Ill. (the company moved from nearby Westmont the week after NEXPO '95), would, in Einlund's words, "operate pretty much the same."

Sysdeco Inc. is to have three primary offices -- Bedford, Mass. (in the same building as Atex), Downers Grove and Salt Lake City, Einlund said.

Staffing at Dewar Information likely will rise from the current 24 to about 30, Einlund said. "They're a little understaffed to take advantage of other markets, magazines for instance," he said.

Sysdeco Inc. said that Clive Segal, who is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Atex and a longtime associate of Einlund, would become the chairman and chief executive of Dewar Information. The company said a new director would be named to run the Downers Grove operation; no mention was made of Larry Justice, Dewar Information's president and chief operating officer.

Though assured of continued availability of DewarView, the "glue" software Dewar designed to provide connectivity between a word processor (Microsoft Word) and a page layout program (Quark XPress), licensed resellers of DewarView were cautious.

"Digital Equipment Corp. is a system integrator and our multimedia services, integration and consulting group will continue to provide solutions driven by whatever platform or software our customers will require," said John Chirico of DEC's Multimedia Group.

"We'll just go on," said pioneering newspaper system integrator Mike Gold of CNI Corp. of Newton Centre, Mass. CNI markets DewarView as well as a database system of its own design.

Executives at American Computer Innovators Inc. of Amherst, Mass., said they had been planning to let their DewarView agreement lapse in October anyway.

Other DewarView integrators include Electronic Data Systems of Plano, Texas, and Pantheon of Seattle, Wash.

Dewar said he chose the buyer of his company carefully.

"I did quite a bit of research on Sysdeco," he said. "I talked to people on both sides of the coin -- I even talked to the old management at Atex."

Dewar is referring to the managers who attempted to lead another group of investors to buy Atex when Sysdeco was attempting to purchase the company; these former Atex executives do not have kind words for Sysdeco.

"If you take a look at their revenues, their income is growing as well," Dewar of Sysdeco. Einlund pointed out that the price of Sysdeco stock on the Oslo stock exchange has tripled in the last year.

"There's been a lot of comments about Atex lately," said Dewar. "'Good Lord, they're picking up another editorial system.'"

The company shouldn't "necessarily have one editorial system," Dewar said, "but have one strategy."

Dewar's career started at Datalogics in the early 1970s, where he wrote the software for a system called Draft 8.

On Aug. 15, 1975, he incorporated Dewar Information Systems Corp., which sold another software package that ran on the same hardware as Draft 8 but provided on-the-fly data compression, so Dewar could say that the system stored 10 megabytes, doubling the capacity of the computer's 5 megabyte hard drive.

By 1982 Dewar Information was selling its own networking environment -- Discnet -- and was building its own 16-bit minicomputers.

In 1985 Dewar wrote Discovery, his display ad makeup system. "I had a great time putting that software together," he recalled on the eve of a trip to Mexico to celebrate his company's sale.

Dewar said "we went through the biggest growth" between 1982 and 1986. In 1987 Dewar began his move away from proprietary hardware -- a full year before the rest of the industry -- and by 1989 had created System IV, which ran on IBM PCs.

Dewar soon realized his company could either write software or integrate systems, but not both. With the introduction of DewarView in 1992, Dewar began to scale back Dewar Information to concentrate on software creation.

In 1993 he took a $500,000 write-down on spare parts for his existing proprietary systems and through attrition and layoffs downsized the company from 100 employees.

Executives at both Sysdeco and Atex said they admired Dewar greatly and looked forward to his involvement in their strategies.

"We bought the name of Dewar," said Sysdeco's Einlund. "We bought a company, we bought a product -- and we bought Steuart."

-- dmc

Atex Publishing Systems Corp.,
(617) 275-2323;
Dewar Information Systems Corp.,
(708) 241-3500.

From THE COLE PAPERS, September 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.