Letting media work for you

By ADAM GIFFORD

Unlocking the knowledge contained within organisations can require new tools and new ways of thinking - but the rewards can be staggering.

Tim Post, the product manager for Ascential's Media 360 content management system, said organisations which have installed Media 360 are getting their investment back within a year.

"One customer, a broadcaster, put in a system for $US800,000 ($1.9 million) and is now getting productivity savings of $1.8 million a quarter, with an 80 per cent reduction in head count for that department," Mr Post said.

What Media 360 does is take any type of unstructured data in any format, store it, index it, retrieve it and then track the use of it.

Its flagship customer is Cable News Network (CNN), which uses Media 360 to manage the 40 satellite and video feeds coming into its Atlanta news centre. Two seconds after reporters start filing stories, editors can see the feeds streaming into the database and start working on them.

Mr Post said the technology had also found a home in book, newspaper and magazine publishers, advertising agencies, video and film production houses, packaging companies, architectural firms and law enforcement agencies, who are using it to underpin facial recognition and speech recognition projects.

"Let's say you are the production manager at an ad agency. Today you may go to a designer or art director and say 'I want that picture on page 8 of the annual report of xyz client.' The art director then spends an hour or two researching where the picture is and calling the printer, and then waiting all day for it to be couriered over.

"With Media 360, the art director can say 'Find it yourself.' And within five or 10 minutes of going onto the system, the production manager would have found the photo, downloaded it to the desktop and done whatever they need to do."

Repeat that scenario at standard charge-out rates each day and the value of a system becomes clear.

Mr Post said implementation can cost between $US125,000 to $5 million, depending on its size and complexity.

The system at present runs only on databases from Informix, the company Ascential was spun off from.

But a version for the IBM DB2 database should be ready by the end of the year, and one for Oracle soon after.

Ascential has also formed a strategic alliance where IBM will sell Media 360 and the Datastage data extraction and transformation tool.