Press - Hosted Digital Asset Management

The Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal and Riverside Press-Enterprise Find Cost Savings in a Merlin Hosted Digital Asset Management System

Quincy, MA, March 30, 2010 - When editors at the Dallas Morning News look for a photo for page one or research a story, the system that they use houses all their data 1560 miles away in a secure, fault-tolerant facility just outside Boston. And they save money while using it.

A. H. Belo Corporation switched to the Merlin Hosted Digital Asset Management System to handle their stories, images and multimedia content. The Dallas Morning News and The Riverside Press-Enterprise went live in 2009, and the Providence Journal followed in January 2010. MerlinOne hosts the fully redundant systems at its co-location facility.

"We had a terrific experience with the MerlinOne team supporting Esheets for our electronic tearsheets service. When we discovered they offered their Merlin Digital Asset Management System as Software as a Service, we were very interested. The MerlinOne pricing model was extremely attractive to us," Andy Young, A. H. Belo Technologies, Director of Publishing Applications.

By switching to a hosted model, all of the newspapers' data was transferred from their legacy Software Construction Company (SCC) archive and picture desk systems to the MerlinOne data center, and put on fully fault-tolerant systems. Merlin Hosted systems are physically housed in a top-notch co-location hosting facility with high security, generator backups and connections to 4 Internet backbones. MerlinOne provides performance guarantees and MerlinOne customer service staff can directly support end-users.

"The response to our hosted offering 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. We are thrilled A. H. Belo Corp has joined the hosted Merlin community," commented MerlinOne President and CEO David Tenenbaum.

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

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About A. H. Belo Corporation - A. H. Belo Corporation is a distinguished news and information company that is anchored by three award-winning daily newspapers: The Dallas Morning News, The Providence Journal, and The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA) along with 12 associated Web sites. A. H. Belo's combined newspaper and online businesses reach a total audience of 3.7 million readers.

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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