Bland said new releases of XPress would now come "between 20 and 30 months apart"; the gap between XPress 3.12 and XPress 4.0 was almost 48 months. Beta testing for XPress 5.0 would be "real soon," Bland said.

Further, Quark now is looking beyond applications to solutions. "We're going to take XPress and we're going to bundle other products with it to make it uniquely suited to an industry," he said.

The company started a new division -- Quark Marketing Inc. (QMI) -- "to deliver complete system solutions with outstanding service and support by combining Quark products with leading third-party applications to deliver solutions."

Bland turned the lectern over to Kurt Dressel, the longtime newspaper industry sales executive who recently became Quark's vice president of sales and marketing -- and who also wears the hat of president of QMI.

"We wanted to see Quark take a more active role in managing the relationships with customers," Dressel said. "And certainly, the customers in the newspaper industry were foremost in those requests."

Dressel said QMI would provide not only a sales channel for integrators of Quark's workgroup product, Quark Publishing System (QPS), but that it would also contract directly with users to provide consulting, system integration, training, installation and ongoing support and service.

"For those of you familiar with our company," Dressel said, "you'll recognize these are fairly dramatic departures from where we were in the past."

In addition, Dressel said QMI has acquired Vision GMbH of Germany and will market its products under the QMI banner. The products are Ad Sentry, a "gateway for digital ads to enter your workflow"; Assistant, a "client-server page-planning system that links your advertising order entry system with your editorial and advertising production systems," and QPS Viewer, a "web-enabled application to allow anyone in the publication who is authorized, to have a real-time view of the publication status through their Internet browser."

Dressel said QMI had an agreement with Adhesive Software Inc. of Austin, Texas, to market Adhesive's WebOS NewsFlash, a suite of software products that ease the transition of content from XPress-based pages to on-line.

Bland wrapped up by saying, "Quark is not the same company it was 90 days ago; 90 days from now, Quark won't be the same company it is today.

"We will stumble at times along the way. I'd be disappointed if we weren't stumbling, because it would mean we weren't moving fast enough."

Vendor views
"It's generally been a good year for newspapers in 1998," said NAA Senior Vice President Eric Wolferman, moderator of the annual industry outlook panel that brings together supplier executives.

Wolferman also suggested that times have been good for suppliers as well. Wolferman's panel -- Gabriella Franzini, newspaper software marketing chief for Unisys Corp. of Blue Bell, Pa.; William Givens, president of ECRM of Tewksbury, Mass.; Don Oldham, chief executive of Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, and Werner Elhauge, director and chief technology officer of SAXoTECH of Denmark -- offered mixed views about the notion that times were good.

"It was a record year for the company, falling on the heels of a record year," said Oldham.

"The revolution in technology requires an update in competence at the newspaper," said Unisys' Franzini. "Technology is the key to enter new businesses. More and more in the future, newspapers will have to rely upon the suppliers able to supply this technology knowledge and react quickly with them."

"Sixty percent of our business has always been outside the United States," said Givens, of the output system maker ECRM. "Nineteen-ninety-eight was brutal outside the United States -- the Asian flu, the Russian ruble. We've seen about a 15 percent decline in units produced and sold to the worldwide market over the last three or four years."

"I have to agree about the outlook for the industry for the next few years," said Elhauge of SAXoTECH . "The Year 2000 problem has, of course, been the cause for a lot of upgrades, (but) the level of upgrades ... have been short-term solutions. Systems will be updated to a much higher level than you've seen recently."

Wolferman asked about supplier consolidation: "Has the pre-press marketplace settled down?"

"The future will probably show mergers among companies that present complementary products," said Franzini, "rather than those with overlapping solutions. When you acquire a company, it doesn't mean that you automatically own that installed base."

Givens gave the audience a primer in business: "There has to be revenues and profits. There's no free lunch."

The newspaper industry has always demanded highly customized solutions -- in the early days, every newspaper had to have its own keyboard, Givens pointed out -- and those customizations cost money. "But the reality is that nobody wants to pay for that," he said.

SAXoTECH's Elhauge countered, "Every newspaper finds themselves to be very special in terms of workflow and attitude, and I think it will be difficult to alter that."

Oldham, whose family publishes weeklies and a daily in Orem, Utah, said newspapers have foisted their inefficiencies on suppliers. "I believe there is a need in our industry for newspapers to be less compartmentalized. There may be a virtue of separating news from advertising, but a virtue taken to the extreme becomes a vice," he said. "It's causing vendors to offer compartmentalized solutions."

Many newspaper suppliers are "living on inherited money," Givens suggested. Relating the story of du Pont's acquisition of Crosfield, Camex and Imagitex in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Givens said the purchases and ongoing support cost du Pont $1.5 billion. "And where are (those companies) today? Gone."

Saying that "there's been a lot of money poured into this industry," Givens pointed out that in the future, suppliers would have to make ongoing profits in order to survive.

"You need to be looking at the financial strength of your vendor community. ... No vendor can afford to survive year-after-year operating losses."

-- dmc

Adhesive Software Inc., (512) 478-7349, e-mail inquiry@eden.com;
Digital Technology International, (801) 226-2984, e-mail: joann_froelich@dtint.com;
ECRM, (978) 851-0207, e-mail: bmcintosh@ECRM.com;
Quark Inc., (303) 894-8888, e-mail: quarktech@aol.com;
SAXoTECH, (011) {45} 6 31 42 00, e-mail: info@saxotech.com
Unisys Corp., (215) 986-4080, e-mail: william.stroud@unisys.com.

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From THE COLE PAPERS, February 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.