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Upbeat Walker looks forward in 2012
PCS’s Managing Director, Phil Walker, has forecast an upbeat 2012 as the company goes into its 40th year.
PCS embassy event success
PCS has made a successful re-entry into Europe thanks in part to backing from the Black Country team at UK Trade and Investment.
changing the game since 1973...
Founded in 1973, PCS has publishing in its DNA. What’s more, it has publishing software development in its DNA. Recently, the company has made a return to its roots by once more focusing on producing innovative, timely and relevant tools for customers across the publishing spectrum.
Press Computer Systems originally spun out of Wolverhampton’s Express & Star newspaper – then as now one of the leading evening titles in the UK – in the aftermath of the development of one of the UK’s first fully ‘electronic’ publishing systems, Press 11, a fore-runner of the digital systems we see today.
Press 11 announced PCS’s arrival and it has been another ground-breaking product, the digital content management and publishing system, Knowledge, that has underscored the company’s return to a more development-led strategy after a period which saw PCS more in the role of systems integrator and reseller.
Although a wholly-owned subsidiary of the independent, family-owned Claverley Group, PCS had established an independence and integrity that made them welcome partners to many in the UK news industry, among national and regional publishers alike.
PCS continues to enjoy the full financial backing and support of Claverley, while operating independently in a way that assures customers of complete confidentiality.
In January 2008 PCS ‘came home’ to Wolverhampton to sit literally and figuratively between the editorial and advertising floors of the Express & Star on one side of its Castle Street headquarters and the paper’s coveted presses on the other.
The appointment as MD of Phil Walker, formerly the Midland News Association’s Group IT director, in April of 2008 reinforced the link between the publishers and their sibling development arm and it was Walker who set about reading PCS its horoscope and pushing forward the Knowledge project he had begun on one side of the fence as customer and was determined to see through on the other as provider.
It was a time of flux and some belt-tightening for the publishing industry and those who served them, with many seeking efficiencies in workflows and costs while striving to keep up with a rapidly changing field of technology which offered tantalising glimpses of future digital revenue streams if they could only find the tools to make it happen.
What was clear too, was that those tools could be as relevant to magazine and corporate customers as they were to those who were traditionally wedded to newsprint, but eager to immerse themselves more fully in the promise of digital.
PCS already had a solid suite of products, its Ad Booking System (ABS) and Newspaper Circulation System (NCS), alongside PropertyNet and some legacy publishing systems, but the arrival of Knowledge with a step-change in database technology allied to browser technology and smart tools for text manipulation, system analytics and the availability of the software as a service, among other innovations, was a catalyst to bring these tools together.
While still a baby in development terms, Knowledge won the prestigious InterSystems Innovator of the Year Award in April 2009 while its implementation at the Express & Star and sister publication the Shropshire Star has been shortlisted in the UK IT Awards Business Project of the Year category.
The PCS story continues and the DNA just keeps getting stronger.
