The Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press last month became the latest newspaper to implement an advertising system from Digital Technology International. The newspaper purchased a 58-seat ClassSpeed system for classified order entry. The newspaper will run ClassSpeed with Microsoft Windows 2000 and Dell 6450 servers with a Sybase database, its database of choice.

The Times Free Press’ sister paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, is also in the process of installing ClassSpeed.

The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., installed ClassSpeed at the end of the year as part of a major project to modernize the newspaper. The Courier-Journal is implementing the classified advertising system and is also redesigning the classified section. As part of that project, The Courier-Journal is also converting to a 50-inch web width and building a new $80-million production plant.

“DTI was everyone’s — and I do mean everyone’s — No. 1 candidate for a vendor.” said Jim Hines, advertising technology manager at the newspaper.

walm Beach Newspapers, owned by Cox Communications, also installed ClassSpeed after purchasing the system in November.

Cox has a long-standing relationship with DTI and has its entire suite of products installed at 15 of its 17 daily newspapers. The remaining two papers were just acquired by Cox a year and a half ago.

“The plan is that when we upgrade, those papers will make the switch,” said Perry Patrick, systems manager for Cox.net.

DTI has integrated its entire suite of products with Sybase because it offers a large database solution that can handle image data bi-directionally. DTI products feature the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 12.5, Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere 7, Sybase Replication Server 12.1, Sybase OpenSwitch 12.0.

Using Sybase allows DTI to offer its suite of products on a media-neutral relational database. Sybase is just one of several relational database solutions available, but Jim Davis, director of technology and operations support at Cox said Sybase does offer some benefits that other databases do not.

“There is a benefit to Sybase,” he said. “DTI uses what’s called BLOB (binary large objects) data types in databases and Sybase was the best database management system for those types of files. BLOBs — like a photograph or a page image — are defined in the database with unlimited size capabilities and different database systems manage those kind of fields differently and Sybase just happened to handle those better than Oracle or Informix or some of the other databases.”

Davis said that over time, he thinks the other databases will follow suit.

“They all know what the other guy’s doing and try to plug that capability in to their next version,” Davis said.

Sybase announced last month that it will begin providing DTI customers with open client support for the Macintosh platform.