Vice president and general manager of long-established US developer Software Consulting Services Kurt Jackson is to acquire the company.

Martha Cichelli – who founded SCS in 1975 and was joined by her husband eight years later – said this week she was “so happy to be able to turn the company over to Kurt who knows the industry so well and who will ensure that SCS continues to provide innovation and excellent service”.

The deal is expected to close within the next 45 days.

The Cichellis – Richard having previously worked at the ANPA Research Institute – are retiring after building a business which claims eight of the United States’ top ten publishing groups as its customers, as well as many community-oriented publishers.

Jackson says he looks forward to the opportunity to “continue nurturing and growing” the company. “We are committed to remaining a premier tech company in the Lehigh Valley and are excited about new products we have in the development pipeline,” he said.

SCS is in the process of introducing a new AI-driven layout application able to design and output multiple page options, for which a release is planned for late this year.

“We are excited about this new product and think it has great potential,” Jackson told GXpress.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania-based SCS says its Automated News Pagination (ANP) application – currently at beta – works with the company’s Community Publishing System or can be integrated with an existing CMS.

The development evolves the automatic placement algorithms of its Layout-8000 product – combining that with available content for a specific edition – to create multiple template abstractions for each page.

SCS-generated template abstractions are used instead of multiple pre-defined Adobe InDesign templates. It will automatically select the “most efficient and ​aesthetically-pleasing” page design as the default.

The company says offering multiple choices distinguishes it from other products, and claims it will generate fully paginated individual pages or ​an entire edition “faster than anything else” on the market. Videos of the process are on the company’s website.