end2end: Publishing Technology News
Publishing Technology Through and Through
Since we restructured last year to unify the Ingenta and VISTA business units under the Publishing Technology brand some questions have come up from our customer base and we’ve compiled them here since they may help several of our readers.
FAQ’s:
Is IngentaConnect still using the Ingenta name?
IngentaConnect is still alive and well however, the Ingenta brand no longer exists. IngentaConnect is now a product line under the Publishing Technology brand. Likewise, customers may still be using Classic VISTA software, however Publishing Technology is providing the support for that software.
Who do I contact for support?
General questions about how to use IngentaConnect should be directed to help@ingentaconnect.com.
Application support questions can always be directed to your account/client manager as well as be sent via email to nasupport@publishingtechnology.com(for North American customers) or eusupport@publishingtechnology.com (for UK/European customers).
Does my account/client manager change?
No, all account and client managers remain the same.
If I have a question about my invoice or contract who do I contact?
These questions should be directed to your account/client manager.
Where is Publishing Technology headquartered?
Our official headquarters is in Oxford, UK. Publishing Technology also has offices in Bath UK; Cambridge, MA; Somerset, NJ; Sydney, Australia; Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
Where is the executive management team located?
George Lossius (CEO), Alan Moug (CFO), Colin Bottle (Group COO), and Louise Tutton (SVP Scholarly Division) are located in the Oxford office. Brian Gibson (COO Publishing Applications), Randy Petway (EVP Strategy and Business Development), and Jay Teitelbaum (COO North America) are located in the Somerset office. Doug Wright (EVP Scholarly Division) is located in the Cambridge office.
How can I stay on top of changes or news from Publishing Technology?
The end2end newsletter is a means for us to communicate with our clients and the publishing community. Our website is also a good resource for learning more about what is going on at PT. We also post news and general comments in the industry on Twitter@publishingtechas well as through our Publishing Technology group on LinkedIn.Please feel free to follow us on Twitter or join our LinkedIn group to keep abreast of changes and participate in discussions.
Welcome to McGraw Hill
Publishing Technology welcomes McGraw-Hill Education, the seventh largest publisher in the world, as our newest client. The global provider of educational materials, information and solutions will be installing the rights, royalties and permissions modules from Publishing Technology’s recently released suite of applications, advance.
By replacing several existing applications with a single, integrated system, McGraw-Hill will now have a holistic view of their rights, royalties and permissions information across the entire group. The new system will provide strong controls with greater flexibility enabling business process improvement, detailed budgeting and greater forecasting capabilities.
The advance suite intertwines Publishing Technology’s more than 30 years of industry expertise with cutting edge technology to create applications with unmatched flexibility and built-in workflow management controls specifically designed for content providers. The end users benefit from dashboards, user-level personalization, an intuitive user interface, extensive workflow management tools, and powerful analytic tools; while IT and Operations areas benefit from accelerated development, process automation and simplified maintenance.
“We are very pleased to be working with such an innovative and established publisher. advance™was developed specifically to address the continuously changing business environment by providing greater adaptability and control to management while creating greater freedoms and personalization for users. It is exciting for us to see that the thought and work that went into this application is being recognized by some of the industry’s best,” commented Randy Petway, Executive Vice President, Strategy & Business Development.
The advance™ publishing platform supports processes related to:
- Relationship Management
- Product Management
- Contracts, Rights & Royalties
- Information Commerce
- Cash to Order
To see more of what advance offers, click here or contact us to set up a demo.
Meet the team: Priya Parvatikar, Technical Architect
Priya Parvatikar, a skilled and dedicated software engineer with 8 years commercial experience in the internet environment and 6 years with Publishing Technology, has recently filled the shoes of her predecessor, Leigh Dodds, as Technical Architect for Publishing Technology.
As Technical Architect for Publishing Technology’s scholarly platform for research IngentaConnect, and publications platform, pub2web, Parvatikar is responsible for the architectural and technical strategy of each. As a knowledgeable and experienced technical professional, Parvatikar, ensures platform development, performance and scalability, industry and web standards compliance, software integration and ultimately designs and constructs the roadmap for Publishing Technology’s platforms.
Priya Parvatikar started as Technical architect in August 2008 and has flourished in this role in the following months. Publishing Technology and its clients anticipate great things from Priya.
Evolving Organically with the Marketplace
The way we interact with our customers and how we use the information we hold about them are keys to maximizing revenue potential from these customers. But understanding this relationship is not the same thing as knowing how to profit from that understanding.
To optimize earnings in a customer-focused environment, two questions need to be answered. Firstly, how can we get to know our customers so well that we can develop products and services that will be irresistible to them? Secondly, how can we best deliver those products or services?
The BMJ Group (BMJG) saw significant potential to re-purpose their digital information assets to better serve customers’ needs, but needed specific technology to help them achieve the goals.
Leveraging Content, Streamlining Control
BMJG’s users interact with the Group in numerous ways, whether submitting or peer reviewing articles, subscribing to products, attending events, registering for email alerts or logging into or personalizing online services. During each touchpoint, end users provide information about themselves that is required to fulfill the purpose of each interaction. If held in a consolidated database, this information creates a hugely important business asset that can be used to increase sales revenues. When analyzed in conjunction with other 3rd party data sets, it can be used to create the required metrics around current market penetration, to identify and define new market opportunities and to define and agree on optimal sales channels for each customer segment. It can also be mined to enable us to fundamentally ‘understand’ the individuals and organizations that have a ‘relationship’ with the BMJ, and how they interact with our content and services. This can lead to new product offerings and the optimization of the user experience for existing products.
Historically, however, each of the BMJG’s websites captured subtly different data about the same users and stored it in different databases. To realize the potential from this information, BMJG responded by implementing a strategic technology solution that fulfilled many roles:
- providing a flexible and extensible database to capture and manage data about the Individuals and Organizations who interact with the Group
- allowing us to define all of the Digital Information Assets that had commercial value to the Group whether sold individually or in collections
- allowing us to define those collections and make product offerings from them under varying license terms
- allowing us to support differential pricing based on user demographics and/or purchase history
- providing an online ordering system with linkage to online payment systems
- providing an authentication and access management system along with single-sign-on
- providing an offers and promotions system
Each of the Group’s websites and mobile offerings are now being integrated into this shared Information Commerce System (ICS). This integration is also enabling the Group to improve customer experience through optimized user journeys. BMJG has created a new single customer entry point called “My Account” to support registrations, subscriptions, voucher redemption and subscription renewals. ICS is becoming the principle repository of end-user and customer data with which all of BMJ websites will eventually interact.
Over the last few years, BMJG had also broken its content down to granular fragments (digital information assets) and stored these in an XML Component Content Management System. Those content fragments can now be ‘re-purposed’ using ICS to create new product offerings and test new business models. Using the new functionality to build products based on collections of the component information assets, BMJG has already released 3 new products to market: Best Practice (bestpractice.bmj.com) with its associated mobile version and a revised version of StudentBMJ (student.bmj.com). They are also actively developing several other new products that are fully integrated with ICS, which will be released in the near future.
BMJG went live with ICS 6 months ago and is starting to ramp up its usage of the full product functionality. The purpose of their migration to ICS was to introduce a very flexible underpinning technology to act as an enabler for their business teams as they seek to maximize the commercial returns from the Group’s digital information assets. With the improved insight into customer demographics and buying patterns, BMJ is now developing the offers and promotions targeting capability to cross-sell and up-sell related products.
As new online business models are rolled out, their effectiveness needs constant monitoring to ensure that they continue to deliver value. This cycle of product development, offering, analysis and subsequent modification, is continuous. To make it effective, reporting needs to be relevant, granular and intuitive. The ICS application provides the flexibility to develop or adapt product offerings and business models as needed with no intervention from technical staff.
What Makes Publishing Technology’s Information Commerce Software Different?
There are plenty of software applications and services available today that address the broad areas of selling things online and getting closer to customers. Likewise, you won’t struggle to find applications and services that facilitate content and document management, as well as storage. Most of it, however, is aimed solely at the sale of tangible goods.
The opportunity for creative business modeling and quick response to changing customer needs – qualities that the sale of digital assets depends on – demands a very different approach from anything suitable for the sale of physical products.
Publishing Technology’s Information Commerce System (ICS) is designed specifically for the marketing and sale of digital assets. ICS enables you to quickly build and deploy flexible business models, tailored to meet the needs of your unique subscriber base and any niche groups within it.
ICS monitors the performance of your chosen business models, and allows you to make changes to them without affecting the performance or stability of the rest of the site. As new markets and customer segments emerge, you can even use ICS to test the assumptions underpinning new models before you take the decision to implement them.
Most significantly, from the perspective of controlling your cost base, the ICS platform is designed to be used by non-technical staff. Content can be added or changed without resort to specialist IT help or service contracts. Anything from adding new products to amending terms and conditions can be achieved in a completely stable environment that is non-intrusive to the ongoing service.
The business benefit of Publishing Technology’s ICS platform derives, in large part, from its extraordinary usability. Sales and marketing teams, editorial personnel or strategists can all make significant changes to a business model without needing any technical knowledge of what’s going on behind the scenes.
By handling the technical end of changes to the business model, ICS enables non-technical staff to concentrate on the business end; building, monitoring and developing three interdependent components -- identities, content/resources, and licenses. These three components combine to help the content owner better understand how purchases are made, while making the creation of an appropriate business model easier. Each element can be fine tuned without affecting the day-to-day running of the site and access rules can be applied to the appropriate portions of the content or subscriber base, as required. For example, access for all registered users to an ‘article of the week’ product could be easily set up and maintained by editorial staff.
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Marketing and Sales Consultancy division, PCG, is Growing
During economic downturns, effective business development initiatives and market intelligence are more important then ever and PCG is there to help. We have experienced an increase in interest in our services in Latin America and have now established a presence in Brazil.
“At times like this, a prudent business investment is essential,” commented Douglas Wright, Executive Vice President, PCG, “and our research shows that, for scholarly publishers, Latin America remains a good prospect for growth. Our role is to minimize their investment and maximize the return on it, by enabling our publisher partners to benefit from the experience and expertise of local representation.”
To fortify this presence, Adiene Teixeira has been appointed to Sales Manager for the region. Adiene joined PCG from EBSCO Brazil, where she served as regional sales manager with responsibility for the corporate, hospital, government, academic and society sectors. Adiene will be managing and developing PCG’s sales and customer support programs in Latin America and will work with a prestigious client list including BioOne, Nature Publishing Group, American Society for Microbiology, and The World Bank.
Adiene isn’t the only new face at PCG. Marco Castellan joined PCG as European Business Development Manager based in our Oxford, UK office. Marco will be working with both US and European publishers on sales and marketing strategies for the European marketplace. He brings 10 years of experience selling a wide range of content for various publishers throughout Europe to his new role. His expertise in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece will be invaluable to our publisher clients looking to expand their reach and visibility.
PCG is also very excited to welcome – Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (US and UK editions). The world’s leading orthopedic publications in the English language selected PCG to provide it with sales representation in Europe and Latin America. PCG’s combination of content sales professionals and research services will give JBJS the opportunity to increase its visibility and market penetration in both regions (and will keep Adiene and Marco very busy!).
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