Atex advertising sale set to accelerate change

Nov 03, 2013 at 09:10 pm by Staff


Atex will still support users of both its Adbase and Sales Command products in the Asia Pacific following the company’s deal with NewsCycle.

The two companies announced late Friday that NewsCycle Solutions – formed from the July merger of DTI and Saxotech – has purchased Atex’s Adbase advertising and audience businesses and operations in Florida, Massachusetts, and Sweden (see earlier story).

But regional director Jerome Laredo says Atex will continue to support local users of both products “for the foreseeable future”.

Singapore Press Holdings – publisher of the Straits Times – is understood to be the only Adbase user in the region.

Other Atex advertising customers – including News Corp Australia and Fairfax Media in Australia mostly use a product derived from what was Bernie Grinberg’s Australian-based Cybergraphic business.

“We will continue to develop (the Sales Command) products as we have quite a few customers using them,” says Laredo.

Former Atex executive vice president for global product management Peter Marsh confirmed to GXpress on Sunday that Sales Command products would remain as part of Atex. Marsh, however, has taken a similar role with NewsCycle, with former Atex marketing manager Alexandra Sibol also joining the new company. In the USA, it has been reported that NewsCycle will become the exclusive distributor of Atex's Polopoly web CMS.

News Corp Australia has recently begun a rollout of Lineup’s digital advertising product, and it’s easy to speculate that – when these are established – they may eventually follow stablemates at News UK and integrate both digital and print advertising in Lineup, despite an Atex upgrade in 2011.

It is not clear how other Atex users in the region will respond to the changes. GXpress was unable to contact advertising-user members of the local Atex Users Group, which was previously the Cyber users group, but understands most were still waiting for information.

It is understood Australasian users of the former Cyber products had mostly declined proposals that they upgrade to other Atex products, and the situation was stable with a mix which included Australian support and some Malaysian development until this year News abandoned Cyber-based Atex editorial – of which they were a (possibly the) major user – in favour of Eidos Méthode.

Fairfax Media – which has a deal with Adobe Systems to use its CQ web content management system – had also been expanding its use of the Méthode system it installed for the Australian Financial Review.

 

It was clear at WAN-Ifra’s World Publishing Expo in Berlin last month however, that the merger of DTI and Saxotech was only a start for Vista Equity Partners, which was acquiring DTI from another PE firm, The Riverside Company.

The deal with Atex – for what Laredo says is “basically the Atex US business mainly based on Adbase” – is thought to have filled some portfolio gaps and was described by Atex chief executive Gary Stokes as “a true win-win” for the two vendor companies. After 15 years investment by its parent Kistefos, the sale would free Atex to concentrate on growing its digital products, and Stokes says the company is in “great shape” a year after refinancing and following a strong performance in 2013.

NewsCycle announced a product and support strategy in September which focussed circulation and advertising on former DTI products and ‘audience’ on Saxotech’s Connect, while digital and content were to be based on Saxotech Online and Mediaware.

Now the scene is potentially set for a further review with the acquisition of Atex advertising and circulation products. Some further rationalisation is to be expected, although NewsCycle says it will support all its customers – including the newest ones – “indefinitely” under its ‘unified and unlimited’ plan.

With its long history, Atex has accumulated technology from a variety of sources. Despite its recent UK base, origins go back to Tewkesbury, Massachusetts, where Douglas Drane and Charles and Richard Ying set up in the early 1970s, producing an early VDT-based editorial system. Those heady days saw early adopters in the USA, and the business was bought (and later sold) by Kodak. It even had Paul Brainerd – ‘father of desktop publishing’ and the originator or Aldus PageMaker – on staff at one time.

The first European users came in the mid-1980s with The Economist and a big installation at News International in the UK.

Productisation of Enterprise and Prestige followed the Kodak sale to a group of investors in 1992, and the business was acquired by Norwegian developer Sysdeco, picking up its current biggest shareholder, Kistefos in the process.

The 2000s saw a merger with Media Command, and later acquisitions of Unisys’ newspaper systems business, Mactive (from which Adbase is derived), and Brazilian technology developer Kaango.

As with Cybergraphic, bought for a reported $11 million, it was Geac which delivered UK-based Matrix to Atex, albeit indirectly, having bought both in a tumultuous 1999. Geac’s publishing business was bought by Robert Banner in 2001, leading to the creation of Media Command, and a merger with Kistefos’ Atex the following year.

It was the dominant Cybergraphic user base in Australia as well as the St Kilda developer cell that was the original and ongoing attraction, but much more recently the loss (and scaling down) of major clients – News to the multiplatform Méthode content management system and Fairfax Media towards Adobe’s CQ – was bound to spell change.

Former ANZ chief executive Ross Wood – previously with both Fairfax and News Limited where he helped get the Wapping, London, site into operation during the 1985-86 dispute – left Atex at the end of last year…. but not until after he had signed News for an advertising upgrade.

For Atex, the 2008 acquisition of Polopoly equally signalled a new direction: While the need for newspapers to bring print and digital together has driven systems sales – and increasingly fashionably, ‘cloud-based’ rentals – the smarts of the Swedish Polopoly technology opened a much wider corporate marketplace. Every company of any size not only has its own website now, but needs a web CMS to drive it, and Atex – the only ‘traditional’ newspaper systems company in the coveted Gartner Magic Quadrant – has worked hard to develop that market.

And NewsCycle Solutions – despite the commitment to existing users – will face a decision about which products to invest in. Audience, which moves to NewsCycle from Atex, is based on the Matrix product, a strong rival to DTI’s BPS-based circulation product line. It’s early for any announcement on this, but the industry expectation seems to be that the former Atex products may be favoured over those of the former DTI, once an industry leader and visionary. Time will tell.

Peter Coleman

Sections: Digital technology

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