Rich Media Publishing and Management Part 2: Sorting The Candidates

Within the rich media publishing and management solution segment defined in a previous article, there are several subcategories of solutions reflecting, among other things, the diversity of potential customers and customer requirements. Some solutions are designed to meet the needs of companies whose revenues are directly tied to their publishing activities; media and entertainment firms, for example. In other industries, the needs vary widely but everyone would like to have an easy-to-use and very flexible platform that allows subject matter experts to create content, publish and manage it, and subsequently to have the media automatically distributed to target audiences.

There is agreement on the vision of what a platform should be, but how should a customer narrow down the field and focus on only those providers likely to meet the customer’s specific requirements? And what are the most important factors to consider when making the final selection?

Current and future providers of rich media publishing and management solutions can be sorted by their business models, the degree to which their solution meets the customer’s definition of an "end-to-end" system and their experience in the market.

A prospective customer of rich media publishing and management systems should begin the selection process by focusing on the solutions in the subcategory most likely to meet the publisher’s needs. This said there are no guarantees that a vendor won’t change categories or business models to meet a customer’s request.