First SAXoTECH U.S. customer also to be a marketing partner

For an off-shore supplier, Denmark's SAXoTECH International is making quite an entrance.

Traditionally, non-U.S. suppliers have had a tough time cracking the North American market. But SAXoTECH, which is based in Aalborg, Denmark, has announced that not only has it sold its editorial front-end system for use at all 31 daily newspapers owned by Morris Communications Corp., a Morris subsidiary will sell the product in the United States.

"We had done a pretty thorough market search and these people seemed to have the most sophisticated system on the market that met our needs," said William Morris IV, president of the Augusta, Ga.-based company. The SAXoTECH system, called SAXoPRESS, is designed to handle print production and on-line publishing as well.

Its client-server environment uses a proprietary SAXoTECH editorial text editor in a Macintosh workstation environment or Microsoft Word in a Windows NT environment. Servers are either Sun SPARC or Windows NT and can run either Oracle or Informix databases. Pagination is done through Quark XPress.

Morris Communications publishes the Augusta Chronicle, the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, the Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal and the Winter Haven (Fla.) News Chief. The companies said that a pilot SAXoPRESS system will be installed at the Augusta paper and "another metro paper" starting this month. Will Morris said there wasn't a schedule for installing SAXoTECH at the 172,000-circulation Times-Union, Morris' biggest paper.

Morris, which purchased the Stauffer Community Newspaper group a little more than three years ago, has been in the system supply business since that time with its Stauffer Media Systems subsidiary, based in Joplin, Mo. Will Morris confirmed that Stauffer Media Systems would sell and support SAXoPRESS; in addition, SAXoTECH will open a sales and support operation based in Morris' Augusta Chronicle building.

Stauffer Media has sold newspaper system components for more than a decade, creating a large installed base. Its product line, aimed at smaller dailies, includes advertising, circulation, accounts payable, payroll, classified interface, general ledger, audiotext systems, an electronic library system and an image database system.

Stauffer Media also has successfully integrated editorial and classified front-end systems using components from Baseview Products Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich.

In addition, Morris has experience in the front-end system sales business -- in the mid-'80s, it developed and marketed a PC-based editorial and classified front-end. Late in the decade, the company licensed Information International Inc. to sell the product, which Triple-I called Tecs/2. (In 1995, Triple-I sold its rights to the software to Publishing Partners International of Bedford, N.H.)

"Morris is a perfect fit," said Werner Elhauge, managing director of SAXoTECH, "not only for using SAXoPRESS, but for distributing it as well."

Elhauge, who led his company's first U.S. presentation at NEXPO '97, said, "To do the best job we can as a supplier to U.S. newspapers, we needed to be here to understand the production and processes in U.S. newspapers."

SAXoTECH was founded in 1992 by Elhauge and Product Development Manager Peter Greve; it has more than 35 employees and is owned by its founders and three Danish companies.

SAXoTECH products are installed at all but one of Denmark's 41 daily newspapers; more than 20 use the SAXoPRESS system to produce their entire editorial output.

-- dmc

Autologic Information International Inc.,
(805) 498-9611,
e-mail: rmedina@autoiii.com;
Publishing Partners International,
(603) 644-3339,
e-mail: 73301.2652@compuserve.com;
SAXoTECH,
(45 ) 8163100,
e-mail: heidi_heunecke@saxotech.dk;
Stauffer Media Systems,
(417) 782-0280,
e-mail: kwood@stauffergold.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.