Atex acquires Unisys: Q&A with consultant Andreas Pfeiffer

Andreas Pfeiffer is in charge of Pfeiffer Consulting and the Pfeiffer Report about technology and business issues in the media industry.

newspaper techniques: In general, what do you make of this acquisition?

A. Pfeiffer: For Atex, a merger with Unisys makes sense, since it will expand the scope of the systems that the company can offer. But the merger also speaks to the fact that these are deeply troubled times in the once comparatively secure worlds of newspaper systems.

The truth is that we have to accept the fact that we may not fully grasp what the emerging new media landscape will look like a few years from now. And this makes survival tough for vendors of highly complex, costly systems. Whether a combined Atex and Unisys will be more apt to respond to these changes remains to be seen.

nt: What should affected publishers or customers be thinking about?

A. Pfeiffer: Professional publishing is about delivering consistent perceived value to readers and advertisers alike. Taking in account the tectonic shifts that are occurring in media these days, it is essential for publishers to be able to adapt to changes much more rapidly than in the past. But these kinds of changes are exactly the weak spot of complex, deeply integrated systems such as the ones provided by Atex and Unisys. We are talking about systems that were not conceived with frequent, unpredictable changes in mind.

nt: Are the days of the small vendors numbered?

A. Pfeiffer: Newspaper systems are as much about service as they are about software engineering. By their sheer size, larger, established players usually have a reassuring quality that smaller players will have difficulty to match. Yet many companies betting on big names have been bitten in the past. Small players can be much more nimble than large companies could dream of being.

In the end, the problem is probably not so much about size, but about capacity to adapt and integrate to a changing environment.

Page first published: 28.11.2006