News roundup for August 12

Last week’s earnings fever has died down, but there were still a couple of items of note this week when much of the northern hemisphere is on vacation: CENIT CENIT reported this week that it saw “increased demand … especially from the manufacturing industry and from automotive suppliers, leading to sustained growth in the product lifecycle management (PLM) field” during the first six months of 2011. For the year so far, revenue was €50 million, up 22% from a year ago, with the PLM business up 17% to €36 million. Perhaps most astounding is the increase in software revenue (3rd party and proprietary): up 50% to €23 million. On a regional basis, sales in North America nearly doubled to €5 million and swung to a €0.7 million EBIT profit due, the company says, to a large one-time project. For the second half of the year, CENIT expects the strength in its software business to continue and has raise its sales and earnings growth forecast for fiscal 2011 to 15%. CENIT resells products from Dassault Systèmes, SAP, IBM Filenet and others, as well as its own add-on products and services. This strengthening of the PLM side of its business is a good sign that the recovery in Europe continues and that CENIT’s customers, at least are optimistic about the future. Help for displaced workers Autodesk wants everyone to know that out of work designers, engineers and architects can still take advantage of the Autodesk Assistance Program. If you’re interested in another vendor’s product, try asking them — even if there’s no official program, you may be able to sit in on a class or get a short-term license to keep your skills up to date. Whatever happened to Quark? Remember Quark, the people who made QuarkXPress? Back in the day, one had to specify with a complex set of characters how something was supposed to look when printed. There were no WYSIWYGs for headers, indents, fonts and the like; it was a lot like today’s html, where characters like “/H” meant something about the text to follow. In the late 1980s, QuarkXPress changed all that, making it possible to define typography, layout and color. The company says that, today, “more than five billion pages have been produced using QuarkXPress, and more than three million QuarkXPress users worldwide are benefiting from a new generation of rich design capabilities for print, Web, and interactive media”. For many people, Quark faded away as word processing tools became ever-more sophisticated and as Adobe’s publishing brands became widely known because of the ubiquitous PDF format. Quark no longer has the market prominence of its earlier days, although it is still the preferred tool of many graphic designers. Earlier this week it was announced that Platinum Equity, a private equity firm, has acquired Quark for an undisclosed amount. Platinum Equity plans to “focus on Quark’s core markets and create an acquisition strategy focused on expanding the breadth and depth of Quark’s product capabilities and geographic coverage”, according to the press release announcing the acquisition.