SII tells users things are going to be different -- it will listen

DES MOINES, Iowa -- If System Integrators Inc. remakes itself as it just told its users it would, the famed Coyote terminal might be succeeded by a Phoenix.

Rising from the ashes of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and seeking to win back its frustrated customers, Sacramento-based SII brought a new key executive -- and attitude -- to the semi-annual session of the System Integrators Systems Users Group, held Sept. 10-13 at the Des Moines Marriott.

With such slogans as "Partnering with YOU for a bright future" and "Reinvesting in YOU," SII thundered a change long sought by its customers -- that they matter to SII.

"We're listening," said President and CEO William Aaronson, addressing a gathering that drew about 40 representatives from a handful of SII's sizable U.S. customer base -- just one-third as many people as attended the spring users session in Sacramento.

"It feels really good to have really qualified people building a team," said Aaronson, who was upbeat and convivial. "I have a hell of lot more help today than I had a year ago."

A prime source of that help is Erika Williams, the new chief operating officer who joined the company at the end of July. In her first brush with users, Williams was stunningly candid, acknowledging SII's past failings as errors she would strive not to repeat.

"One of my avocations is to make sure that products work and they work well," said Williams, who left Amdahl Corp., a computer company based in Sunnyvale, Calif., where she was senior vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Storage Systems division, a $350 million-a-year operation (see sidebar).

Her deep experience in product development (she's also a programmer) will be crucial for SII, as it announced few new products here -- notably, making its Tandem database SQL-compliant, and moving its MTX products to Windows 95 and Windows NT -- and heard fiery criticism of its current goods and customer relations.

SII's "franchise is very valuable," Williams said, taking note of the 300-site global market penetration the company enjoys, particularly among major U.S. newspapers. "We have to keep earning it."

In an appeal to do just that, she said, "I want to know what you folks think are the problem areas," then addressed the major problem she had identified in her whirlwind first six weeks on the job.

"We're doing too much fire-fighting," she said. "It's good that we're really responsive to customers, but there are too many fires out there."

A failure to deliver products that work as advertised was one part of the problem, she said. Other issues she found troubling included difficulty developing products customers wanted, documenting them adequately and providing ongoing support.

In subsequent discussions, Williams talked of forging new relationships with old customers, with SII inviting its customers to product focus groups, sending SII staffers to newspapers to learn firsthand how they work, entering into joint product development with sites, and elevating the quality of help provided through SII's worldwide help desk, GlobalNet.

"I plan to spend a lot of time with customers, trying to understand what their problems are," said Williams.

Customers, as represented by the smattering of SII sites in attendance, gave Williams universal rave reviews, while reserving judgment on whether the company in fact was going to change enough to warrant having faith in its products, promises and prognosis.

"I'll believe it when I see it," said Barry Abisch, manager of news technology of Gannett Suburban Newspapers in White Plains, N.Y., and president of the users group.

Abisch quickly put his comment in context, citing a four-year relationship with SII laced with disappointment and frustration, then describing Williams as the shot in the arm SII needed -- one that gave him hope the company could rebound successfully.

One long-time SII employee, clearly reinvigorated by changes that he said could have come only from the top and finally had, said simply, "More has happened in the last 45 days than in years -- just boom, boom, boom."

In a breakfast session hosted by SII, company executives unveiled a new marketing strategy, gave product status reports and took heat from users without returning the disdain and arrogance SII has been known to display in the past.

Buying into the industry trend that will turn newspaper companies into information providers in several media, SII said its development thrust would be broadened beyond its traditional focus on production systems to encompass information gathering.

"We will provide the key getting-it-in and getting-it-out technology," said Frank Scholes, head of the strategic business planning group, one of five SII divisions directly responsible to Williams (a sixth, MediaBridge, is headed by Steve Nilan, who reports to Aaronson).

Scholes said SII wants to provide newspaper companies with support and products for multiple media, goods that can be cost justified, ways to handle the added complexity of moving beyond ink-on-paper, a low-risk means for newspapers to integrate their own "best of breed system solutions," and an appropriate return on investments and assets.

"We're not designing a new system," Scholes said, "just taking existing systems and looking at them in a new way."

Those existing SII systems will be getting more relevant, robust and reliable, said Jeff Smith, manager of worldwide product planning. He vowed that shortly customers would have "a single point of contact for product information," and that plans called for creation of a "customer input forum."

"We need input in order to build products that you want," Smith said. He detailed upgrade plans for current products:

å Version 3.2 of MTX, SII's OS/2-based editorial front-end, was released in August. Version 3.3, due for release in the first quarter of 1996, will implement TCP/IP directly (obviating the need for the troublesome hardware needed to connect the network to the CPU).

It also will include command-line interaction with the operating system, an integrated spellchecker and a revised directory window scheme in which the same window may be used over and over to list stories (now, a new window pops open each time a directory is requested).

MTX is in use at the Miami Herald, Tulsa (Okla.) World, Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, London Press Association and New Zealand Press Association as well as at other papers.

å Version 3.2 of MTX Layout, the successor to INL (Integrated News Layout), was released in August with a feature set that equals Inl 9.3, its final iteration. MTX Layout 3.3 also is due early in 1996, featuring chiefly bug fixes and some improvements in functionality.

Now in use in Ogden, MTX Layout will be on-line soon at the Denver Post, Miami Herald, Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal and Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post.

å Amtx, the OS/2 advertising system now in use at Gannett's two papers in Rochester, N.Y., and due soon at the San Diego Union Tribune, will be upgraded early next year to eliminate bugs and improve "general usability."

In an exchange typifying SII's new attitude, Smith explained that Amtx does not support H&J on the client workstation. The client code needs to be rewritten to match the code on SII's CPU/server, made by Tandem Computers of Cupertino, Calif. -- which would happen if his budget plan is approved, he said.

"We'll show how quickly we do things at SII -- his budget is approved," Williams said from across the room.

Smith then said version 2.0 of Czar, SII's Classified Zoning And Rating classified system, will be scheduled for release following beta testing at San Diego.

Notably absent from Smith's presentation was any mention of two products users both want and have found frustrating to get and use -- SII/Mac, which provides access to the Tandem server from a Macintosh, and SII/Quest, a Quark XPress XTension that was intended to provide access to stories on the Tandem server by calling them into a Quark document, editing them and then storing them back on the Tandem.

Users voiced dismay that not only were these products not on Smith's list, the word "Macintosh" passed his lips only in relation to Siam, a Mac-based ad makeup integration product now in search of a beta test site.

"We have no project now for Mac connectivity," he said, then touched on plans to port the MTX product line from OS/2 to Windows 95 and Windows NT. (Any MTX product bought between now and the end of March 1996 will be upgraded to Windows 95 at no cost, Smith said, with a fee only for installation.)

The major project, though, is working 50-50 with Tandem Computers (which no longer has a financial stake in SII) to provide open database connectivity -- making data stored on a Tandem server accessible to third-party applications. Smith said the first phase was fairly simple, requiring additional software that would require little work by any one site to implement.

"Migration to nonstop SQL will involve more work," he said, not disclosing a project schedule.

Other products with upgrades in the offing, and new products under development, included SCP, a classified pagination product in beta testing; Scoop, an output management tool in use by several sites that is being reviewed in light of reliability issues raised by users having exceeded SII's expectations on how it would be used, and Credit Desk, a process for clearing credit-card purchases on-line.

In striving to address the always-critical issue of money, Ron Stephens, the director of North American sales, laid out a series of plans for buying batches of SII products, with three tiers for each. An MTX client now costs $3500. Under the new plan, one to 50 MTX clients would cost $2750 each; 51 to 150, $2400 each, and 151-plus, $1900 each. (Unlike buying pencils by the gross, the unit price does not fall as the purchase order grows -- the first 50 will cost $2750 each no matter how many more are bought.)

(Still available are the boards and software for two PC-based workstations, CAT/ST and RoadRunner. A $750 trade-in allowance for any "brown Coyote" -- the original iteration of the terminal product -- is offered for these two PC products.)

The pricing scheme, which SII had predicated on 11 percent interest, received a lukewarm response. Larry Skeels, systems manager at The News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., suggested SII should be offering lease plans for products, essentially for a try-out.

SII said it would consider the question on a site basis. The idea is particularly applicable to its new two Internet products, WebLink:E and WebLink:C, which transfer data from an SII front-end to the World-Wide Web -- an inviting new arena with absolutely no assurance of a return on investment.

SII announced that it is the first value-added retailer to sign with Netscape Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., whose Internet browser software has won wide acceptance. Work on Netscape-related products will be undertaken by both MediaBridge and in the professional services division, according to Richard Peck, the unit's business development manager.

"We're a job shop -- we do customization," Peck said, not mentioning the I-word -- integration. Why? The group plans to go beyond that, with projects to interface WebLink to Lasr, link a Realtor's Multiple Listing Service to an SII classified system to upload the broker's ad text, photos and logos, and undertake systems and facilities management on an outsourcing basis.

While encouraged by SII's new openness and frank admissions of its problems, users found much fault with current products and support.

In the customary end-of-meeting complaint session, this time attended by SII staff, users listed 15 outstanding issues they wanted SII to address yesterday.

Among the 15 were these three, which had been touched on repeatedly during the four-day meeting:

å The year 2000. SII, Tandem and other computer companies must come up with a way to store the first year to begin with "20" in their systems.

One paper said it considered this the paramount issue, as it calculated that if changes had to be made, they had to be in place by Jan. 1, 1999, and whatever changes SII was going to make had to be installed a year before that date to give its sites time to implement and debug those changes.

å Macintosh connectivity. It's fine, users said, to be porting things to Windows with many panes, but newsrooms rely on Macintoshes for third-party graphics and pagination applications, and SII was simply failing its customers by not having made these links sooner.

Users suggested that SII/Mac be made a single application, not the three-part kludge it is now, and that SII/Quest be integrated into SII/Mac -- and both made to work properly.

å A Coyote on every platform. Complaints about the Coyote's successor, MTX, were many, but the group decided that the best way to get the message across to SII was to say that any front-end product SII markets needs to do at least what the tried-and-true Coyote editor could do, complete with such utilities as Lgen, Fgen and command interpreter.

The discussion turned to Decade/33, a Coyote-like interface to a Tandem that runs on a Mac or PC made by CE Engineering of Loomis, Calif. Users suggested to SII that if it offered a similar product for less than $2000 a copy, it stood a good chance of winning considerable business.

Besides, why hadn't SII done it itself?

(CE Engineering and SII are locked in a legal battle over Decade/33, with SII claiming copyright infringement and theft of intellectual property rights. CE is preparing to countersue, once the pending SII case -- its second against CE -- has been concluded.)

Last June in Atlanta, SII's Nexpo '95 booth was a dark and gloomy place, populated by listless staffers and precious few show-goers. The featured attraction was vaporware in the form of a marketing plan that was simply incoherent.

In the months between Atlanta and the users group meeting in Des Moines, changes inside SII clearly have energized the staff. An executive retreat at Lake Tahoe in July involved considerable soul-searching and led to more fine-tuning of the organization, which had been recast in January.

Even so, "been there, done that," might be the expected reaction from SII sites long accustomed to seeing the industry's onetime 800-pound gorilla put on one new face after another in its struggle to regain the vision and strength it once enjoyed.

But things are different this time, SII and its users agree. The most striking change is in the attitude SII staffers displayed, which many attributed to the addition of COO Williams.

But equally important was word from everyone at SII that, by God, customers count -- and SII wants them back.

"I'm hopeful that Erika Williams will be able to keep the company on track, moving in the right direction -- that things won't get bogged down like we've seen in the past, that we'll see results in a more timely fashion," said Dionne Cohee, a programmer analyst in systems and engineering at the Washington Post, whose experience with SII stretches back 13 years.

Another veteran of the SII wars, dating to System/22 in 1980, also was optimistic about the company's direction.

"The good news from this past meeting was continuity from the last session -- you can tell that Bill Aaronson listened," said Jim Allbright, systems projects manager for the Denver Post who was at the spring meeting in Sacramento. "Erika Williams is a major sign that Bill Aaronson is listening to the users."

While noting that "all the other things will come to pass if they actually listen to Erika," Allbright suggested SII might have to "reevaluate" its product line.

"Maybe some of the products they want to make it easier for people to buy aren't necessarily the products people want," he said.

After the happy hoopla, though, SII won't have a lot of time to prove it's truly reborn. If System Integrators is listening to its customers, it'll move quickly to heed Barry Abisch and deliver on his warning:

"I'll believe it when I see it."

-- Pete Wetmore

CE Engineering,

(916) 652-5263.

System Integrators Inc.,

(916) 929-9481.

See also:

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