Media in the Real World
Setting up for Success
The key to a successful enterprise project is to define the goals, as well as the constraints within which you will need to work. Fortunately Herr, Cameron, E-Business Product Manager Steve Paris, and their internal business partners had the experience to set themselves up for success.
Three different departments were looking for more robust solutions: the intranet streaming group, the public web portal, and the company’s secure customer extranet. Each team had different needs, resulting in a broad list of technical requirements.
- Support for content delivery both on the Internet, and behind the firewall on Air Products’ Cisco Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN).
- Ability to monitor what people watched, and the quality of their experience—both for standalone video, and rich media presentations created with Accordent PresenterPRO and MS Producer.
- A controlled, but flexible, publishing process that provided preview and approval for some content, but allowed other content to sit outside that process.
- Seamless integration with Air Products proprietary extranet.
Despite the stereotype of enterprises wanting to control—and often develop—virtually every piece of software in their own datacenter, Cameron and company decided to evaluate a range of solutions, including a new breed of hosted software. After evaluating a range of products, Air Products selected the hosted option for thePlatform media publishing system™.
"We selected thePlatform because they provide a unique combination of technologies—particularly the integration of detailed reporting with comprehensive publishing," says Cameron. "The ASP software offering has worked extremely well for us, and we always have the option of bringing the software in house—that flexibility gives us a lot of comfort."
"Actually, It Is What You Know"
Despite the old saying about who you know being more important, in the world of enterprise information technology, what you know is crucial. The first application for thePlatform at Air Products was monitoring streaming inside the firewall.
Politicians take polls and movie studios watch box office receipts week to week, but for enterprise streaming media, knowing whether a particular video or presentation is a success is often a matter of guesswork, making the return on the investment difficult to measure. Air Products was looking for a way to know more, so it could do better.