Rich Media Publishing and Management Part 2: Sorting The Candidates

How Far Do You Define "End to End"?
Another, more difficult segmentation analysis is based on the completeness of the solution or service offered. Here, the customer must assess what is required and match that with the solution offered. The biggest downfalls of this segmentation are the parallel challenges of determining exactly what is needed and exactly what a vendor or service provider offers.

Content management, for example, is very big area and there are many shades of grey, which can be defined using the same terms. Digital Rights Management suffers from the same broad scope and potentially vague terminology. Customers are responsible for their own education in this category. Just because it’s offered doesn’t mean it’s needed and if a solution’s on-line product description says it’s offered that doesn’t mean it’s real. Marketing collateral can be deceptive, describing the capabilities of a system that is on a vendor’s road map but not available at the time of the solution purchase.

Another variable in this end-to-end definition is the degree to which a customer seeks business process workflow integration. Customers should examine if a vendor offers a customized package for his or her vertical market, or something that is designed for the size of company and target audience. For example, a solution designed for the media and entertainment industry will have a very slim media capture application because content creation is this vertical market’s specialty. The same industry will need a very robust distribution system. Sonic Foundry’s MediaSite Live is highly tuned for higher education and learning market applications, making it very easy to turn on the system at the beginning of a lecture and have the content both streamed to remote students and archived for on demand viewing by other registered students. Other vendors have targeted workflows, compliance regulations and security concerns commonly identified by customers in government or the pharmaceuticals market. This narrow targeting of a solution is especially valuable when and where it includes integration with existing systems frequently deployed by customers in the vertical market.