Prepress
Publishers Press partners with Atex for Polopoly Web Content Management System
Monday 21. September 2009 - Publishers Press, a Kentucky-based printing company and content distributor, signs an OEM agreement for the Atex Polopoly Web content management system and Atex Text Mining engine. Publishers Press will deliver the Atex system to its 500 customers and 1,200 titles under a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
The choice of the Atex Web content management system and text mining engine comes as Publishers Press looks to create a fully integrated content distribution services platform. “We do business with small- to mid-sized publishers and so we are vitally linked to the success or failure of those publishers,” said Michael Simon, executive vice president at Publishers Press. “We want to help them invest in their future, so it has become incumbent upon us to provide the digital publishing services that will help them succeed.”
With its open APIs, scalability, template-driven design, and ease of integration with third-party systems, the Atex Polopoly system gives the Kentucky printing company the key functionality it requires in a Web content management system.
“We wanted technologies that would allow us to dissect content and serve it up to various digital channels,” said Debbie Glasscock, director of e-Opportunities at Publishers Press. “What Atex Polopoly provides, in our opinion, is a modular infrastructure with quite a bit of out-of-the-box functionality and components you can plug-in and support quickly.”
“Publishers Press is a strong company with a long history of serving the publishing industry, and we are proud to create this partnership for the Atex Polopoly Web CMS,” said John Hawkins, Atex Group CEO. “Polopoly is the cornerstone of our Atex Digital News and Advertising strategyan effort we launched two years ago to help make content more valuable by linking news and advertising in ways that are increasingly targeted, collaborative, and available on-demand. Atex DNA gives media companies an integrated product that unites advertising and content management systems in a robust digital environment. Now, through this partnership, the most critical part of this offering is available to a wider array of publishers than ever before. We look forward to working with Publishers Press to help those publications enhance their digital capabilities and generate new online revenues.”
Along with the Atex systems inherent functionality, ease of use was another factor impacting Publishers Press decision. Recognizing that many of its customers may not have experience with the intricacies of an advanced Web content management system, Publishers Press sees the Polopoly point-and-click graphical interfaces and Atex Text Minings automatic metadata searches and categorizations as providing a significant amount of capability without requiring extensive training.
“One of the things that really begins to bog down publishing companies once they consider making investments in software is the never-ending series of maintenance and renewal agreements, upgrade obligations, and training and development issues,” explained Dick Ryan, director of business development for e-Opportunities. “It became important to put that burden on our shoulders, provide affordable digital publishing services, and take some of the risk out of the equation for our customers.”
Content management is the third component of the Publishers Press e-PubXpress digital suite, which also includes digital magazine and e-mail marketing solutions. The digital suite allows customers of Publishers Press to expand their digital publishing business while maintaining relatively low amounts of IT responsibility. To provide this, e-PubXpress uses a SaaS model, with Publishers Press taking on much of the operational cost and support services. For small- to mid-size magazine publishers without a lot of capital to spend on state-of-the-art software, the SaaS model provides the basic features and capabilities of the complete digital suite at a fraction of the cost associated with capital expenditure models.
According to Simon, “Weve been entrusted by our customers to handle content in their print production workflow for many years. Nearly every one of our customers has Web domains that correspond to their publications, and when our customers begin to look for more ways to take advantage of digital publishing, it will make perfect sense to them that Publishers Press has made this investment. With 500 customers and over 1,200 titles, we have a lot of work to do. But Atex has made it clear that it has the necessary commitment to support and training that we envisioned.”