Press - Hosted Picture Desk

Leading Newspapers Cut Costs by Switching to Merlin's Hosted DAM

Quincy, MA, September 10, 2008 - The mass migration from newspapers owning a picture desk and archive to "renting" a hosted picture desk has kicked off, with three leading newspapers signing up for Merlin's hosted picture desk system. The Boston Globe, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune have all committed to MerlinOne's Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) hosted picture desk for their Merlin digital asset management systems in 2008, taking advantage of Merlin's ability to provide a hosted digital asset management system at a lower price point than any individual newspaper can achieve internally.

"The response to our hosted picture desk has been great. This really 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," commented MerlinOne President and CEO David Tenenbaum. "We expect virtually all of our newspaper customers to switch to Merlin hosted picture desk over the next 3 years: the savings are that compelling."

By switching to a hosted picture desk, all the newspaper's data is moved to the MerlinOne data center, and put on fully fault-tolerant systems. Merlin's unique storage technology cuts the storage required for a newspaper's digital assets by up to 70%, and those savings are passed along to the customer. The Merlin hosted picture desk 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 guarantees, fault-tolerance and an interface to pre-press production systems. Merlin customer service staff will directly support end-users.

Merlin serves as a production picture desk, and as an 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 Microsoft Office documents using fast, precise searching with easy and flexible drag-and-drop workflows.

MerlinOne will also host its Trax assignment management and workflow system, which supports photo, video, story, audio, graphics, scanning and research assignments. Trax integrates tightly with Merlin, adding rights management, scheduling, contact information and more.

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.

Press Contact
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