PRE-PRESS LOOKS PAST 'PRESS'

System developers from five companies serving the newspaper industry looked back on the year and ahead to their futures during an Industry Outlook panel Tuesday morning. They also sometimes found their customers moving in different directions.

As newspapers continue to set up or support new-media operations as separate entities--indeed, several major players appear to be positioning to take theirs public--system developers are focused on bringing all news operations into central systems.

"Are we ‘pre-press’ suppliers?" asked Larry Moore, chief operating officer of Ctext Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich. "Do you need a press to use our systems? No."

Of course, the suppliers all focus on print considerations when designing their products, but they also have a sharp eye on solutions that work across media platforms.

The business is "no longer just about text," noted Frank Washington, chief executive officer of System Integrators Inc. in Sacramento. This is an increasingly multimedia world, he said, but with newspapers "right at the hub."

Roberto Antoniotti, chief executive officer of Tera S.p.A. of Milan, Italy, said, "One of our goals is to develop software that crosses borders." With archiving and digital-asset management systems installed around the globe, including at The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., Tera opened an office in the U.S. in 1999 and is throwing itself headlong into the market fray with systems that focus on addressing information in a centralized way. "We call it prepurposing instead of repurposing," he said.

All the vendors characterized 1999 as a strong year financially, spurred in part by Y2K concerns. They acknowledged the tentativeness of this success, however.

"We saw a spending boom of the wrong kind," said Karen Weltchek, president and chief executive officer of Atex Media Solutions in Bedford, Mass., noting it was circumstance-driven. She also cautioned that bullish advertising predictions for 2000 might mask problems such as cannibalization of classifieds by the Internet.

Still, she said Atex is investing in research and development to meet the needs for systems that are "media neutral," including forming new-media partnerships.

Bernard Grinberg, vice president of product marketing for Geac Publishing Systems in Tampa, quipped that 1999 was "not as spectacular a year as we could have had if we had had more Y2K problems to solve," thus underscoring the compliant status of his systems. Grinberg had been chairman of Cybergraphics Inc. and chairman and managing director of Cybergraphic Systems Ltd. when Geac acquired those entities mid-1999. He stressed that Geac was actively building a global business through such mergers.

Grinberg and Antoniotti both said that many newspapers, particularly the larger ones, bought patchwork solutions to Y2K that left many fundamental needs unmet, thus providing marketing opportunities.

-Terence Poltrack