Prestigious company: Two views of the Atex Prestige editorial front-end system. On the left, the screen that assists in tracking pages; below, the screen that assists in tracking stories.

Atex shuts down Omnex project and leans on Europe's Prestige

Following almost four years of gestation, Atex Media Solutions Inc. announced in December that it would cease development of its new content management system, Omnex.

The Bedford, Mass.-based industry pioneer said that it would take some functionality from Omnex and add it to the company's Prestige editorial front-end system. Prestige, developed in Europe and sold there as well as in Latin America and Asia Pacific for much of the last decade, has been marketed in North America since March 2000.

Omnex, one of three new content management systems (a term that can be interchanged with "editorial front-end") unveiled by leading industry suppliers at NEXPO '99, had not been adopted by any publisher and had only one "alpha" site -- the Financial Times of London -- and two "beta" sites -- the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong and The Star of Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Though some U.S. newspapers had expressed mild interest in the product, none had made any commitments.

None of the early adopters had put the system into any type of production environment.

"It was financially no longer responsible to continue development," said Max Coebergh, president and chief executive of Atex. "We had a moral obligation to our customers. To string them along with expectations would not be right."

Coebergh said that Atex had laid-off approximately 35 people as part of the discontinuance of the product, but hastened to add that some Omnex developers were retained to take Omnex modules and move them over to the Prestige environment.

The longtime industry executive said that the Atex workforce now stands at around 300. In addition to Prestige, the company sells a classified advertising system called Enterprise and an advertising layout system called Architect.

At one time, Omnex was seen as the future of the company. The vision was that Omnex would move Atex far beyond its traditional base in the newspaper business and on into businesses such as radio, television (both broadcast and cable) as well as making Atex a player in the world of Internet- and intranet-related products.

Omnex was designed to be a true multi-media, content-neutral management system. It was to feature revolutionary typesetting composition, asset management features and Web publishing features as well as traditional newspaper functions such as wire collection.

The Atex board of directors believed that Omnex was so important to the future of the company that it authorized what Coebergh indicated to be as much as 20 percent of the company's revenues to be applied toward research and development of the product.

A new subsidiary
Further, last year the board split the development of Omnex off from the day-to-day operations of Atex and established a wholly owned subsidiary, Omnex Technologies Inc. (OTI). All research and development personnel were moved to this subsidiary and Karen Weltchek, the former president and chief executive of Atex, became the head of OTI. With the shutdown of the Omnex development, Weltchek left the company.

The idea behind the split, said Coebergh, was that Atex's core competency is in newspapers and that it would market Omnex there. "We would be the newspaper channel," he said. OTI would do all the development and sell into the non-newspaper markets. Coebergh said that as a separate entity, OTI could "attract the outside investors required to fund developments for these specific markets."

Coebergh admitted that the developers had made some errors early on in the Omnex development and that last year they realized their mistakes -- at least some of them. Unfortunately, Coebergh said, the developers did not go deep enough into the internals of the system in the initial repairs and recently found that they would have to again delve deeply into the product's underlying computer code.

"In hindsight," said Coebergh, "if you asked the engineers what went wrong, they would say, 'We didn't go back far enough the first time.' "

Coebergh said Atex had hoped Omnex would be available a year ago. More recently, he said, "we had hoped to go into beta testing late last year or early this year." But the system was "delayed and delayed."

At the same time, the alpha and beta testers, the Financial Times and South China Morning Post, faced office moves in the near future and they did not want to have to move their legacy systems into those new offices. So they were getting somewhat impatient.

Further, there was the problem of the general lack of interest among U.S. newspapers.

Gary Ward, information systems development manager at The State in Columbia, S.C., whose paper uses DewarView, an editorial front-end product that was sold by Atex for most of the 1990s and was developed by the company from 1995 until last year, said that suppliers of large-scale editorial front-end systems such as Unisys Corp. of Blue Bell, Pa., and CCI Europe of Kennesaw, Ga., may have beat Atex to the punch.

"Speaking as an Atex customer," said Ward, information systems development manager of The State in Columbia, S.C., "we were looking for Atex to come out with something, but they kind of missed the boat with the Unisys and CCI products out there. Omnex might have been a little too late."

Ward has a point: most of the major metropolitan newspapers that have needed an editorial front-end system in recent years have made commitments to either CCI or Unisys. High-profile accounts like the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and the Arizona Republic made CCI Europe decisions before the Omnex announcement, but recently enough that they would not have a reason to switch.

Meager pickings
Previous Atex customers who have switched to CCI Europe systems in recent years include the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer, California's Orange County Register, USA Today, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.'s Sun-Sentinel and the Indianapolis Star. Similarly, Unisys has sold editorial systems to former Atex customers, which include the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, the New York Daily News and Newsday of Long Island, N.Y.

Further, both companies count recent sales to newspapers that would have considered Omnex last year at this time, had it been available, including the Wall Street Journal (Unisys) and the Los Angeles Times (CCI).

This left Atex with rather meager pickings for Omnex in the newspaper industry, which though it would scale down to smaller operations quite well, would have been priced at a point that would discourage smaller publishers from considering it.

Atex's largest shareholder -- Kistefos Industrial Group of Norway -- watched as Omnex's costs went up and up and its prospects went down and down. "The shareholder ran out of patience," said Coebergh, in December.

And that was the end of Omnex.

While some may mourn Omnex's passage, mourners may not include many existing customers. The Atex Newspaper Users Group morphed into the Association of Publishing Systems Users (APSU) in 1995 when the supplier changed its name to Sysdeco (see sidebar). The current president of APSU is Jim Beatty, the systems manager of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

From Apsu's standpoint, said Beatty, "The demise of Omnex doesn't have a great effect on our membership. The majority of our Atex users are on the Enterprise side and that certainly seems to be the company's strong suit."

With the end of Omnex, Atex must now put all of its editorial hopes on Prestige, a product that was not sold in North America until last year.

Prestige, which falls into the "Quark XPress welded to Microsoft Word" category of editorial systems, is nondiscriminatory regarding databases or server technology. It will support databases from Oracle Corp. of Redwood Shores, Calif., Sybase Inc. of Emeryville, Calif., or Informix Software Inc. of Westborough, Mass. The product supports either Microsoft's Windows NT or virtually any flavor of UNIX on the server platform.

Unfortunately, the client side of Prestige is not quite so ecumenical: while it supports both Macintosh- and Windows-based workstations for page layout, there is not yet a Macintosh client for writing and editing, though Coebergh said the company was at work on one.

"Its power comes from a very elegant integration between Quark and Word," said Coebergh of Prestige, citing the fact that line endings of stories are the same in both applications, affording writers the opportunity to write-to-fit and editors the opportunity to edit in Word, rather than having to move over to XPress.

XPress-welded-to-Word
And while Prestige offers a number of other quality features -- a workflow that uses the "basket" metaphor, messaging, wire-service collection, integrated pagination services, and a separate hyphenation-and-justification server and an interface to Web publishing -- it is still an XPress-welded-to-Word system.

The shortcomings of this type of system -- which was pioneered by DewarView and is alive in offerings from suppliers such as Agile Enterprise of Nashua, N.H., and SAXoTech of Rockville, Md. -- include reliance upon Quark Inc. of Denver, and Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash., to not "break" the newspaper application when these major software companies upgrade their products.

For example, when Quark released its 4.0 version of XPress two years ago, all the XTensions -- little add-on bits of code that the application adopts to extend the features of the program -- developed for the 3.0 version of the page-layout application, ceased to work. XTension developers were forced to go back and rewrite their code to make it work with the 4.0 version of XPress (and then to maintain a separate code base for its customers who didn't upgrade from the 3.0 version).

Though Quark says that its 5.0 version won't break XTensions, sources inside the company indicate that porting the XPress application to Macintosh OS X will cause all the XTensions to break again.

Prestige depends upon Quark XTensions for a vast majority of its page-layout features.

"Is Prestige Omnex? No it isn't," said Coebergh, but he did emphasize that Atex intended to take as many Omnex features as could be transferred and move them over to the Prestige product. Omnex engineers are investigating which modules can be moved into Prestige.

Prestige, said Coebergh, is designed in a modular manner. "In Prestige's case we made some real efforts from the beginning to make it flexible. Tomorrow, say Oracle comes out with a new version, is that going to break it? No."

Coebergh said that Atex does not have current plans to pursue a stronger relationship with Quark -- as have SAXoTech and Net-Linx Publishing Solution's System Integrators division of Sacramento -- because "we're still getting a lot of inquiries about InDesign."

The newcomer on the page-layout block from Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, has attracted a lot of attention and traditional suppliers ranging from Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., to Geac Publishing Systems of Tampa, Fla., have begun to integrate InDesign into their offerings.

And Digital Technology International Inc. of Springville, Utah, has based its upcoming version of its editorial front-end system entirely on InDesign.

A Prestige system based on InDesign could become a competitive force in the editorial front-end world.

Atex has sold Prestige into a small handful of sites in the United States since last March's decision to use it to supplant its DewarView editorial front-end, which the company had sold for almost six years. Army Times Publishing Co. of Springfield, Va., which publishes seven military-oriented tabloid newspapers, purchased the system last summer, and last fall implemented the Web-publishing module with the startup of seven web sites. Army Times is a division of Gannett Co. Inc. of Arlington, Va., and Coebergh said that two other Gannett newspapers are about to sign contracts for Prestige as well.

Elsewhere around the world, Prestige is installed at La Repubblica, a 750,000-circulation daily in Rome, Italy. Coebergh said that the paper's 400-workstation system would soon grow to more than 700. In the Netherlands, VNU Business Publications has more than 100 workstations, which it uses to produce 25 separate publications.The Nation Multimedia Group of Thailand has 170 Prestige workstations. Nepszabadsag, a 320,000-circulation daily in Budapest, Hungary, is also a Prestige customer.

-- dmc

Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-4281; (800) 833-6687;
Agile Enterprise Inc.,
(603) 880-6440,
e-mail: ttlynch@agileenterprise.com;
Atex Media Solutions Inc.,
(781) 275-2323,
e-mail: info@atex.com;
CCI Europe Inc.,
(770) 420-1101,
e-mail: edeasley@mindspring.com;
Digital Technology International,
(801) 853-5000,
e-mail: dtinfo@dtint.com;
Geac Publishing Systems,
(813) 872-9990,
e-mail: vsinfo@geac.com;
Harris Publishing Systems Corp.,
(321) 242-5330,
e-mail: hpscmktg@harris.com;
Informix Software Inc.,
(508) 366-3888;
Oracle Corp.,
(650) 506-7000,
e-mail: receive@us.oracle.com;
SAXoTech Inc.,
(301) 294-0805,
e-mail: info@saxotech.com;
Sybase Inc.,
(510) 922-3500;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com;
Unisys Corp.,
(215) 986-4080.

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.