Publishing Partners Buy Adds Advertising Component To Unisys Publishing Solutions

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, August 9, 1999

Unisys Corp. is acquiring Publishing Partners International (PPI), a privately held provider of advertising management software and services for the publishing industry.

By integrating PPI's advertising component, Unisys says it will significantly expand the functionality of its rapidly growing publishing program.The current Unisys publishing solution provides a complete editorial, electronic pagination and archiving system.

The PPI acquisition is part of Unisys' strategy to extend its growth in repeatable solutions for customers in target industries.Unisys repeatable solutions combine consulting and integration services with software components that can be assembled and modified to meet a customer's specific business requirements.

Unisys offers a portfolio of more than 30 repeatable solutions for publishing and other key market sectors.

"The acquisition of PPI adds an important new dimension to our publishing program," says Terry Hisey, general manager, Unisys Commercial Market Sector Group."In addition to our enhanced capability of providing an integrated publishing solution that now includes advertising, our holistic approach to meeting the business needs of our publishing clients is a key differentiator for Unisys in the publishing industry.Unisys can uniquely provide a broad, full lifecycle set of offerings to the newspaper industry including consulting, solution definition, solution integration -- through deployment and even ongoing management."

Headquartered in Bedford, N.H., PPI's AD2000 advertising management system integrates order entry for classified and retail advertising with billing and account receivables.AD2000 provides a complete solution for advertising, regardless of the final destination -- print, Web or other media.

PPI has a client base of 75 newspaper customers including USA Today, The Birmingham (AL) News, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), The News-Sentinel (Knoxville) and the Boston (MA) Herald.