For today’s printer, publisher and retailer the world is digital — and getting more digital by the day. According to Forrester Research, by 2002 more than 98 percent of all business organizations with 1,000 or more employees will have deployed their strategic business processes onto the Internet to serve customers, vendors, partners and employees. The impact of such a phenomenon is clearly being felt in a business environment that relies so heavily on printing.
Digital asset management (DAM) is a growing industry. Last year, it is estimated, North American companies spent $507 million deploying DAM systems and that amount could double this year, and grow at a rate of 60 percent annually over the next four years.
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For companies like eBusiness Technologies, a Providence-based division of the Inso Corporation, the move toward digital technologies has paved the way for its MediaBank application.
MediaBank, a function of eBusiness Technologies in Providence, is an asset management solution. It enables users to store, archive and retrieve digital assets and information including, text, documents, images, movies, graphics, sounds and fonts. And it does so quickly. Instead of a printer or designer spending hours trying to find images and other files for page layout, MediaBank instantaneously organizes and tracks them.
That’s important for customers like publishing giants Time and Newsweek, and retailers like Eddy Bauer and Land’s End.
“For date-driven magazine publishers, for example, we are helping them expedite their process,” said Jeff Melvin, general manager of eBusiness Technologies’ MediaBank. “We are shortening the time it takes for them to deliver their product. We manage the process of building the publication — people call it work flow.”
Melvin said that one wave of the future in printing, is the ability to create and maintain assets that can be re-used, and therefore mined for greater revenues. For retailers, he said, it’s a big part of the catalog business – where customers may re-use images depending on the season or style. Storing images in MediaBank, and making them available indefinitely, adds significant value for a customer – particularly customers looking to maintain a timely Web presence.
“Our customers want to be able to take products out of MediaBank and move them onto Web pages,” Melvin said.
Amy Carpinella, director of customer service for MediaBank, likens the application to a library.
“We’re a library, if you will,” she said. “That’s what our product does for our customers’ assets.”
MediaBank is currently being used by commercial publishers, pre-press and digital service providers and advertising and design agencies. It is catching on throughout a wide variety of industries. For example, eBusiness Technologies recently signed a deal with the Nassau County Medical Examiners Office. MediaBank will allow the medical examiners office professionals and investigators to access mission critical information stored in thousands of image-based files. In essence, by improving workflow and the cataloging system, MediaBank is expected to greatly reduce the time it takes the Nassau County Medical Examiners Office to solve cases.
The move to take advantage of digital printing opportunities shows no sign of slowing.
“Every major publication in the world is doing some digital process these days,” said Ed Zeitz, director of product management at MediaBank.
