Quark says it has acquired a majority stake in Silent GmbH, a German firm that provides products and systems integration services to the publishing and newspaper industries.
Quark's investment will allow Silent to expand its operations beyond European markets, where its various software applications are used by about 70 publications, Quark said in a statement.
Silent is the parent company of systems integrator firm Vision GmbH. The two companies will continue to work independently of each other as Quark subsidiaries. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"The boon for Quark is our ability to utilise their extensive German publishing experience to develop future client/server technologies," said Susan I. Friedman, vice president of Quark corporate development in the statement.
In February of this year, Quark acquired Coris Inc., which makes Coris Publisher 3.0, also with a view to expanding its client/server offerings.
Last week, Quark announced its interest in potentially acquiring Adobe Systems. Adobe has not responded favorably to Quark's proposal.
In related Quark news, the Denver, Colorado-based firm also announced today a marketing deal with Sun Microsystems which will see the two companies promoting Quark's publishing software running on Sun's hardware and its Solaris operating system.
Under the terms of the deal, the companies will jointly market and support Quark's Digital Media System (QuarkDMS) and Quark Publishing System (QPS).
Quark's products have traditionally been used in desktop and workgroup environments, the company said.
The deal with Sun will make Quark's products more available to customers in the enterprise computing market space where Sun's products are already well established, the two companies said.
Quark can be reached via the Web at http://www.quark.com/. Sun, based in Mountain View, California, can be reached at +1-415-960-1300 or at http://www.sun.com/.