Betting the Firm on a Digital Infrastructure
Posted by Diane Burley on 18 April 2013 08:58 AM |
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I started in digital publishing at the onset — when you had no choice but to go out and roll your own infrastructure. There simply were no other options. Building from scratch was long and arduous, but as most anyone of a certain age will tell you, across any industry, you have a deeper understanding if you do things mechanically/analog-ally/manually/(wrongly) first — digitally second. Fast forward nearly two decades and publishers, marketers, businesses are afforded a luxury of rentable, turnkey, hosted digital solutions. Pay and play, as they say. But what starts as a luxury can become a handcuff — stunting imagination and curtailing opportunity. At last week’s MarkLogic World, Brian Bishop, VP Platform Strategies at Springer, related his company’s path from renting to putting a stake in the ground and breaking ground on its own digital foundation. According to Springer’s 2011 Annual Report, e-revenues were just about 40 percent — and the board felt it was time to move off that 3rd party provider and be at long last the master of their own domain. MarkLogic would power the content platform — and it would be done in 11 months — before the service contract with their content vendor expired. Bishop, who had started a “skunk works” project on MarkLogic a few years back — and had since created a handful more, knew the flexibility of the database. He was in love with MarkLogic’s “serialized search” the ability to save queries — which he used as an incubator for new revenue streams. “Whatever you can design as a query, you can sell – and in fact, you can sell the query! Still, he had a dev team of 3 — a far cry short of what would be needed if they were to “recreate 36 man-years of code.” The Despite the stacked odds, Bishop bit and took the challenge. He staffed up, cracked a few knuckles, hired a scrum master who could implement and teach them Agile and within 7 months had hit a major milestone that foretold the success of the project. The new, feature rich beta site was opened to the public last summer, and the migration was finished in November — a full month ahead of schedule. For beating those odds, I hope the payout is HUGE!
Betting the Firm on a Digital Infrastructure from MarkLogic. |
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