Quark has long been a company caught in the crosshairs of customer opinion. On one axis is a devotion to and dependence on QuarkPress; on the other is frustration about and anger toward the company’s customer support policies. But due to a number of factors, such as shifts toward enterprise publishing and competition from products like Adobe InDesign, Quark has been making changes in an effort to gain new customers — and more importantly, keep existing ones.
Perhaps the biggest change the company has made is in terms of leadership. In February 2004, company co-founder Fred Ebrahimi relinquished day-to-day operations to Kamar Aulakh, appointing him Quark CEO. A Quark employee since 1995, Aulakh earned his stripes in the company by developing manufacturing and IT systems as well as by leading Quark’s research and development efforts. Unlike Ebrahimi, who was viewed as volatile and secretive, Aulakh is more candid when talking about Quark’s current challenges and future opportunities.
Creativepro.com caught up with Aulakh during a whirlwind visit to the United States from his home base in Switzerland.
creativepro.com: I haven’t seen you for a while, not since the launch of QuarkXPress 6.
Kamar Aulakh: Well, we’ve done a few things since then and hopefully we’re doing the right things with our customers.
cp.com: That’s what I’d like to hear about from you. QuarkXPress 6.5 was launched at GraphExpo recently, so, let’s start by giving me an update on that and some perceptions about how Quark was received.
KA: Our booth was visited quite heavily and was packed. I’m told it was more [trafficked] than some of our competitors and there was a lot of interest in 6.5. And you know it’s more than XPress now. We have all the enterprise products.
We just launched a new suite of enterprise products that are related to commerce. [Ed. note: The products were discussed in interviews, but no official announcements were made.] Marketing is just working on the official name of it, but I am calling it Quark Commerce. Not only can we help our customers create, manage, and deploy content, but now we are associating the business transactions with that content as well. And this is going to be shipping later this year.
cp.com: Is it built on the same or similar platform as the other media management tools that you have available?
KA: Yes. XPress will have additional features that help support our customers who have been asking for the enhanced XML features, especially in books and journals and in the documents-type market. But [with the enterprise products] we also support our customers who have asked for Citrix, for example, especially in the Scandinavian countries. [They’re also asked for] our support for variable-data printing and in the personalization area.
But getting back to XPress 6.5: Another aspect that has really received an awful lot of attention is that we offered our first image-editing feature in Quark — QuarkVista. We will be building on this more and more. Image manipulation had to be done in another program, but now it can be done right in XPress. We’re trying to focus on the total cost of functionality for our customers, to provide them more value for the same price.
cp.com: What do you think are your critical objectives going forward at this point in time?
KA: We have two general objectives, and sometimes they can be contrary. One is to provide our users — designers, graphic artists, the creativity people — with more tools so they can create better messages, and personalized messages. The second one is towards business-management people, where we continue to focus on productivity and efficiency. They want to do more with less. And the reason I say sometimes they can be contradictory is because we have to prioritize in both areas.
For example, we have to come up with designs for a few more feature sets to add more to Quark 6.0, 6.1, 6.5, and now 7.0. The obvious example I use is transparency. We decided to wait till 7.0 [to add transparency]. It was technically no big deal, but we just said okay, let’s do some of these other features first. But some of the creative community wanted transparencies in 6.0. But [we decided to] stay with 7.0.
cp.com: When you hear those kinds of requests from customers, what is your philosophy for dealing with them? You said that you’re prioritizing. But you have a very vocal customer base. How are you approaching them about these decisions?
KA: One of the things we are doing a lot can be grouped as a whole general mission we have. It’s called “the new face of Quark.” What that is, is really just indicating warmth with our customers. [This applies to] all aspects of communication, not just the pieces of the desired feature set. But it’s more than just that. We have to talk to our customers. We have to find out what’s important to more people, and then prioritize other features based on that. But again, having that balance of creativity and efficiency.
cp.com: I do think that one of the things that has troubled Quark in the past has been because the company has not wanted to talk about upcoming features — understandably, very few companies do. However, given the way the marketplace has changed, it does seem to me that Quark is becoming a little bit more open. How does one balance giving away all the competitive features versus keeping customers satisfied that the features they want are forthcoming?
KA: That’s a good question. The way I look at it, one has to have the capability to deliver, which I believe we now have, because we have 1,500 engineers, or 1,600 engineers, and growing…
We worked on this for a long time, building that manufacturing capacity, the ability to deliver predictable, quality software for a predictable type of market. If one is comfortable with that, then I don’t have an issue with talking about future relations and features. Because then competition will need to play catch up, then they also have to have the ability to deliver.
cp.com: And you’re confident that you’re going to be able to deliver.
KA: I can tell you right now: 7.0 will be out next year. And I could even tell you more details on that, but marketing would beat me up.
cp.com: What kinds of things are you hearing back from customers about the competition and what they want to see you do in response to that? How do you keep a Quark customer?
KA: Let me address it this way first. We have four business units: Desktop, Enterprise, OEM, and then the Commerce unit that we’ve just created. And our competitors in each area are different. Adobe is really only a competitor on Desktop, even though they have enterprise.
Enterprise is a whole slew of different people. They have usually gone to management solutions, that’s one set of people. Editorial solutions, a different set, is primarily smaller companies. Our vision in that area is to provide a more complete solution set for our customer base. So they don’t have to go to five or six or four different vendors and get different pieces and then try to integrate them. And then [what happens when] two vendors are gone in two years’ time because they weren’t financially viable? You know, they didn’t have the revenue to last. We want to be a reliable vendor that’s going to be there. We’ve been here for 20 years and we’re going to be here at least 20 more. We can provide that complete set of solutions they’ve been asking for.
But in terms of keeping Quark customers, in general, what they’re telling us is that we have been [retaining them].
Let’s approach the desktop, for example. Our competitors have been overselling and perhaps under-delivering. Whereas we were completely opposite. We didn’t even show up. We didn’t even talk.
cp.com: Which has its advantages and disadvantages.
KA: Well, we’re going to talk to a customer, that’s the whole thing about the new face of Quark. You know, good, bad or indifferent, we’re going to talk. And lay it on the table, find out customers’ issues, what do they like about us, what can we fix, how can we improve, what features to add. Listen to it all. We target that. We’ve opened up — we’ve added staff. Now we always had a very strong R&D group, and we reinvest a very high percentage of our revenue as R&D, and we’re going to continue that.
But we’re also adding a lot of customer facing staff. So we can communicate better with the customers. We just opened up in the last six months or thereabouts new offices in New York, Paris, London, and Hamburg, so we can be closer to our customers. And we will continue to do that.
cp.com: Have you been able to tell, or are your customers noticing, that they are seeing “the new face of Quark”?
KA: The feedback we’ve been receiving is quite positive. That’s the message we got at GraphExpo. At IFRA in Amsterdam, which was in the same week [as GraphExpo], the same message we got there. And yes, they are quite pleasantly surprised.
cp.com: In terms of becoming the CEO of Quark, what have been your most difficult challenges in taking over this company, especially at such a critical point in its development?
KA: I think the biggest challenge has been changing the company from one that had an internal focus to one that is in the process of having an external focus. It’s not just good enough that internally we develop these great tools and we put it on the shelf, and then we develop the next tool and next product, which is cool and all that stuff. But what are we doing this for? You need to talk to the customer, and that means shifting the entire focus from engineering, from the organization, to look outside. What are the issues with us? What are the problems the customers are facing? And then it’s building the solution, changing a whole development life cycle and methodology to one that is again focused on progressive prototyping. Working with the customers, showing them a prototype, proving it, and showing it to them again. Even the software development needs to have an external focus.
That has been my biggest challenge. I think we’re succeeding. And we’ve got a ways to go, but we will get there.
cp.com: In the work that you’ve done with XPress, do you have a favorite feature that you really enjoy using?
KA: I like our ability to do illustrations and put text on a curve and that kind of thing. Of course I like now that I don’t have to buy a competitive product to do image editing. I like that I’ll do my cropping and brightening up and all that kind of stuff, without investing money in another third-party product. And now also, something else we’re going to do is in the next few months, probably by the first quarter, allow import of Photoshop files into XPress.
Not only do we have our own image-editing tools, we allow PSD files as well.
cp.com: I don’t know if you were even with Quark at that time, but I certainly weathered the QuarkXPosure effort earlier on [QuarkXPosure was Quark’s Photoshop competitor that never reached market]. Photoshop is one of those things … well, Photoshop is what it is. Many people have tried to slay Photoshop, and no one has succeeded. I think having direct import of PSD files will actually earn you a lot of fans.
KA: Pam, here’s the thing about Photoshop. Remember, that’s what they said about Quark up to five years ago, seven years ago. Until somebody came up, “Let’s challenge them! Let’s do this thing called InDesign, or Page Maker, whatever.” Yep. The light is on again. It’s the same mindset.
I think competition is good for the customer. Why not give Photoshop some competition? Especially for our customer base that uses 15 percent of Photoshop features. Why would they have to spend $500-whatever dollars? Just do it right in XPress.
cp.com: So in essence you can learn from the most recent experience with Quark. You’ve felt a little bit of competition, and why can’t Adobe get some competition for Photoshop?
KA: I believe so. What do they say? You going to take it to them, or what?
cp.com: So can you give me some insight about the facility in India? There’s been a lot of press about outsourcing to India and things like that. Can you give my readers just sort of a snapshot, an idea of what it’s like over there so it’s not so weird and mysterious to them.
KA: First of all, let me just say that we’re a global company. We have three million users around the world. We do 26 languages. But even though we had Quark in Denver, we have an obligation to supply these people around the world with the tools and so on and so forth. So we have offices around the world.
Our largest development center does happen to be in India. But we didn’t go where everybody else goes. We didn’t go to Bangalore, we didn’t go to Mumbai, we didn’t go to Delhi. We selected a place where we thought would have the best quality of life for our employees. Because again, in the software business, you’re only as good as your employees. So it’s in a place called Chandigarh, which is about 150 miles or so north of Delhi. It’s in the foothills of the Himalayas. Here was a town designed from scratch by a Swiss architect who lived in Paris — Le Corbusier. It was a planned city. So we thought that area was probably a good area to start, to set up shop. I had personally set up shop [for Quark] in Singapore and Germany. Remember during the Internet boom, you couldn’t hire an engineer, the demand was so high.
cp.com: Right.
KA: So we were forced to really go and look at the other sources of software engineers in the world. And that is when we set up development centers in Germany and Singapore and then, ultimately, in India. So this whole process started six to seven years ago. Since then we’ve realized that it’s difficult to develop totally different places. So we’re now consolidated just in the U.S. and India.
Going back to the Indian center, when we initially went there, we were kind of the odd faces. “Why are you going up there? There’s nobody over there. Nobody will come over there.” But we’ve been quite successful. We built our own facilities. The facility there is no different than the one you’d find in Denver or in California. The equipment is the same. We treat the people the same. We’ve actually outgrown that [Chandigarh] facility, and now we’ve rented two separate other facilities, and we’re building another two facilities. So I don’t know, to me they’re all the same. They’re all Quark employees. It doesn’t matter where they work.
cp.com: What’s your goal for Quark moving forward?
KA: We want to be closer to our customers. We want to be the best business partner our customers have. We want to find out the issues and develop solutions. Develop tools to help them do what they have to do better and more efficiently. And what we specialize in is creation, management, deployment, and now the business transactions associated with that content. We support the content lifecycle. If you look at that content lifecycle, what is it really doing? We want to help our customers communicate with their customers and potential customers better. We are helping them personalize their messages. Our latest tool sells some various products like DDS and all focuses a lot on personalization,, like variable data printing. So it’s helping them develop a better, more personalized message more efficiently.
cp.com: Many of my readers, and I think many other readers, tend to think that QuarkXPress — the desktop creative product — is all there is of Quark. I know I’ve tried in the past to explain that a little better, but it’s a tricky thing. Enterprise publishing, as you’ve noted earlier, seems to be so anathema to the creative side that there is that split, just even in people’s perceptions of Quark.
KA: You’re right. Perhaps there’s a feeling that we should devote as much energy as possible towards that cool feature set that helps them to be more creative. But our obligation is to all the customers at large, and we want to do the best for them and we will do the best for them, but also do the best for business managers.
cp.com: If you could deliver just one statement to your customers and one statement to your competition, what would it be?
KA: Well, to our customers, we want to be your business partner. We want to work with you and provide you with the best solutions possible to help you do what you do better. Do it more efficiently. We want to be a reliable business partner.
For our competitors, watch out.
We think competition is good. It’s good for the customer. It breeds innovation. We think it’s great that the competition is around. But we are also here. And just watch out.
This article was last modified on January 10, 2022
This article was first published on November 2, 2004
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