Rich Media Publishing and Management Part 2: Sorting The Candidates

How Well Does a Solution Integrate with Other Vendors?
The third important way of segmenting the rich media publishing and management sector is precisely according to the last point made above. Partnerships are the basis for integration. Vendors should be developing relationships with complementary solution providers. And a customer should be asking vendors about their ecosystem strategies. In particular, it is important to have partnerships with leading companies in all or any component at the two extreme ends of the workflow: media production and delivery to the target audience.

It is difficult for a small, resource limited company to do everything, therefore partnerships can spread the weight and assure the customer some integration should one vendor choose to narrow the focus of a platform that has been deployed. Digital asset management is an example of technology that is relatively well defined and around which partnerships with leading DAM vendors can leverage a customer’s existing technologies. Paul Ritter, Collaboration and Content Management Research Program Manager with The Yankee Group, has conducted research that indicates that large companies with content management systems recognize the need for more sophisticated, intelligent systems designed to specifically repurpose corporate knowledge.

"Customers who have already deployed document and digital asset management systems understand the benefits of knowledge management and want to extend their ability to mine the content captured in rich media as well as that generated in instant messages and real time communications," Ritter explains.

Partnerships can take a long time to establish and seamless integration as might be necessary for integration with DAM systems requires resources. For this reason it is important for the customer to seek insights about a platform’s history. Most of the solutions available today have their origins in other companies whose names have long been forgotten, yet the software has gained maturity through repeated and extended exposure to production networks. For example, Media Publisher Inc. is the name of the company offering Media Publisher that successfully spun out of Yahoo! after the portal provider’s acquisition of Inktomi in 2002. The rich media publishing technology was acquired by Inktomi when the company acquired eScene in 2001.

This said, not all solutions mature as well as and have the benefits of the Media Publisher platform. There are risks involved with adopting a platform that is based on an operating system that is no longer current, or that relies on hardware for acceleration that can be provided in a general purpose server.