Press - Hosted Digital Asset Management

MerlinOne Offers a Way for Publishers to Save Money - A New Hosted Digital Asset Management Initiative is Announced

Quincy, MA, March 30, 2008 - Offering a significant cost-savings for publishers, MerlinOne, Inc., will begin a hosted solution for its Merlin Picture Desk® and Digital Asset Management System.

"This is a game-changing situation: for the first time news organizations will be able to have a world-class application available to their users without the capital burden of continuous server and storage upgrades, without IT department workload, and with totally predictable, low costs," announced MerlinOne President and CEO David Tenenbaum.

In use at 5 of the top 6 USA newspapers, Merlin serves as a production picture desk, and as a digital archive for all forms of digital content. A complete digital asset management system, Merlin allows users to organize millions of photos, video and audio files, graphics, stories, PDF files and Office documents using fast, precise searching with easy and flexible drag-and-drop workflows.

MerlinOne's Trax assignment management and workflow system, which can handle photo, video, story, audio, graphics, scanning and research assignments, will also be offered in the hosted environment. Trax integrates tightly with Merlin, adding rights management, scheduling, contact information, and more, into the work process.

"Outsourcing is being used to perform functions that previously were held near-and-dear in-house. Newspapers are outsourcing significant portions of their advertising departments, and the idea of "Software-as-a-Service" (SaaS) has brought cost savings in many other areas," comments Tenenbaum.

The Merlin hosted digital asset management systems are physically housed in a top-notch co-location hosting facility with high security, generator backups and connections to 4 Internet backbones. MerlinOne will provide performance assurances, fault-tolerance and an interface to pre-press production systems. Merlin customer service staff will directly support end-users.

MerlinOne has been a vendor to the news industry for more than 20 years and has been hosting systems since 1999. Merlins' hosted customers include Pfizer Drugs, Harvard University, Tufts University, the Landov picture agency and the largest Merlin system in existence, E-Sheets® electronic tearsheets service. E-Sheets has currently 110 million records and adds a million new records about every 8 days. The service is used daily by every major advertiser and agency in North America.

MerlinOne will be distributing a comprehensive white paper at NEXPO which details the initiative. The Merlin hosted digital asset management system will be available to newspaper customers starting Q4 of 2008.

About MerlinOne - MerlinOne, Inc. is a leading provider of digital asset management systems and electronic document discovery platforms. E-Sheets® is the foremost electronic tearsheets service. The Merlin picture desk management solution has over 140 major installations at corporations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Harvard University, Pfizer, Habitat for Humanity and The White House. MerlinOne technology helps companies manage photos, text, graphics, PDFs, multimedia and e-discovery material.

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