It has appointed Michael Perkins as director of business development and is recruiting a sales consultant, pre-sales engineer and post-sales project manager.

They will all report to regional business manager Nick Martin.

The team is expected to be in place by the end of June. It is part of Quark's bid to address its core market of publishers, repro houses, corporates and retailers.

Perkins, who was previously vice president of business development for AGT subsidiary Agile Enterprise, has already begun meeting with big QuarkXPress users.

"Quark realised the seriousness of the situation in the UK and took me on," said Perkins. He said the industry's reaction had been positive and that it hadn't written off QuarkXpress in favour of Adobe InDesign.

"No one's told me to toddle off," he said. "It's not all doom and gloom. It's about getting out there to people and saying we're here again."

The firm is working to address UK users issues especially concerning technical support.

"We've got to improve our response," said Perkins. The firm is increasing its efforts to sell its systems such as QPS and its asset management product DMS.

It is investing over 20% of revenues in product development and more than 600 engineers over 50% of its workforce are involved in product development. In the last year Quark has started to show more interest in the UK market. At the start of this year it offered a licensing deal for firms upgrading to QuarkXPress 6 who needed backwards compatibility following feedback from the Digital Ad Lab (PrintWeek, 29 January).

Story by Barney Cox