June 1999, Vol. 10, No. 6

Jackpot

NEXPO '99 brings three new editorial systems from major suppliers

It appears to be unprecedented, certainly in the almost 20 years that I've attended newspaper trade shows: At NEXPO '99, to be held June 14-17 in Las Vegas, three of the leading suppliers to the industry will unveil new editorial systems.

Atex Media Solutions Inc., Digital Technology International and System Integrators Inc. will all demonstrate new systems (though it will probably be after the New Year before you could actually install one of these beasts).

Inside, you'll find my recommendations of the 60 NEXPO booths most likely to attract your attention, my recommendations for the seven booths you must visit and our high-quality, four-color map of the trade show floor.

I have had the opportunity to view the three new systems (in various stages of finished demonstration polish) and it's interesting that the companies have taken three distinct avenues.

Atex, for example, is at one end of the spectrum. Though the venerable supplier of front-end systems based in Bedford, Mass., has existing editorial products that greatly leverage off-the-shelf software components (DewarView, sold in the United States, and Prestige, marketed elsewhere in the world), the company has chosen to write its system, called Omnex, from the ground up.

Though the company has used components developed by other suppliers (Fingerpost for wire collection, Bitstream for composition), this product is heavily weighted toward what we now call "industry-specific software" (we used to call it "proprietary software")

In the middle, DT has taken its almost entirely industry-specific software solution and leavened it with a big dollop of off-the-shelf software: the Springville, Utah-based company now relies heavily on Adobe Systems' InDesign for a variety of services. Essentially, InDesign now sits in most DT applications, handling composition and design chores.

The company has also cleaned up its use of the Sybase database and provided a new set of tools for users to access the databases; no longer do they have to log on multiple times. The company also says that it has implemented the first true newspaper industry relational database.

At the other end of the spectrum is SII. The longtime sufferer of the "not invented here" syndrome has thrown off its shackles with Insiight, an editorial front-end system based on Lotus Notes. The Sacramento-based company plans to back-end the standard package of Insiight with InDesign for composition and makeup.

Using software licensed from Associated Newspapers of London (which has developed a Notes-based system that is partly deployed at its three titles, The Mail, Mail on Sunday and Evening Standard), SII adds an intelligent level of middleware between Notes and other applications. The company says that in the long run, customers will get to choose components. You don't like InDesign? Use Quark Publishing System. Don't like Notes? Use Microsoft Exchange.

That these three key players would pick such radically different approaches is more of a story than their similarities (all three use eXtensible Markup Language; two use Adobe's InDesign). It means that the Fourth Wave is dead.

In the late 1980s, the Seybold Report on Publishing Systems proclaimed the Fourth Wave. The first wave, the newsletter said, was hot metal; the second wave was cold type, and the third wave was the dedicated publishing systems of the '70s and '80s. The Fourth Wave was to be off-the-shelf hardware and software with a minimum of proprietary software binding it all together.

Well, the industry certainly embraced the off-the-shelf hardware, but it's clear from these three systems (in addition to the success of players such as CCI Europe and Unisys) that the amount of "industry-specific software" in a solution has no bearing on how well the product is received in the marketplace.

The Fifth Wave is off-the-shelf hardware and the best combination of software available, without giving fear or favor as to whether it's off-the-shelf or not. (It is true that lots of off-the-shelf software means a lower price, while lots of "industry-specific" software means a higher price.)

It's as if we'd all walked into a Vegas casino and dropped a quarter into a slot machine: The newspaper industry has hit a jackpot with these new systems.

-- David M. Cole