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Quark subsidiary offers publishing services

The firm announces a $5 million investment in Quark Marketing, a subsidiary that will sell and integrate projects built around the company's Quark Publishing System.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
Kim Girard
2 min read
Quark is hoping to make headlines with a new company focused on providing services to its publishing customers.

The Denver-based company today announced an initial $5 million investment in Quark Marketing, a subsidiary that will sell and integrate projects built around the company's Quark Publishing System (QPS), as well as the Quark Digital Media System.

Quark Marketing will provide sales, consulting, training, systems integration, and legacy data conversion to its customers, executives said. The division also plans to work with third-party vendors on systems integration projects.

The move is a nod to the industry trend toward a more direct relationship with customers by providing one-stop shopping for both software and services.

Through this latest initiative Quark Marketing will absorb some employees from Quark and recruit 20 more for open database programming and field engineering jobs. About a quarter of Quark Marketing's employees will be based at the company's Denver headquarters, with the rest located around the country. Two new Quark Customer Care Centers are planned for San Francisco and New York.

Earlier this year, Quark, a privately-held company, made headlines with a bid to acquire rival Adobe Systems. Quark, which has annual revenue well below half of Adobe's, dropped that bid in September, citing market conditions and Adobe's rejection of a deal.

In August, Quark reported that revenues grew 23 percent in the second quarter, as compared to the same period a year ago. Revenues in the Americas rose 42 percent against year-ago figures, due to brisk sales of QuarkXPress 4.0.

Markets the company will target with its latest initiative include newspapers, magazine publishing, advertising, graphic design, financial services, manufacturing, corporate workgroups, legal, medical, and entertainment.