Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/34797
Tools that help you manage your business and save money. By Christine Bunish The downturn in the economy has meant boom times for de- velopers of facility management software designed to help companies of all sizes operate more efficiently. “It may seem counter intuitive that 2009 and 2010 were our best years ever,” reports Greg Dolan, executive VP of Xytech (www.xytechsystems.com).“But the numbers were squeezed, even by big studios, and everyone was looking at ways to contain costs and gain efficiency in every step of the chain, from scheduling to accounting to workflow. Our soft- ware can help them make money.” Xytech’s Greg Dolan: The company’s modular MediaPulse software is now in its fourth generation. XYTECH Xytech, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, is working at capacity,“putting out about a system a week” of its flagship MediaPulse software, whose fourth-generation product was introduced at NAB 2009. “We looked at where the industry was going and felt our technical platform needed to be rewrit- ten to make it relevant for the future,” says Dolan.“The next couple of months we will increase capacity [so] expect an- other record year for us.” Dolan says MediaPulse supports everyone from “bou- tiques to enterprise-class systems interacting with a thousand users,” including many major Hollywood studios, post houses worldwide, the content arm of a major sporting organization and a spectrum of cable and broadcast networks.“About half of our customers are in the small to mid-size market nation- ally and internationally,” he notes. “That’s where it’s essential to prove your value.” The value proposition for the modular MediaPulse, he says, is that it’s “an off-the-shelf product with highly configurable op- tions.You can completely remake the user interface and inte- grate it into any number of platforms.” MediaPulse enables users to follow any piece of content “from inception to distrib- ution: budgeting; activities from scripting to crewing the studio 34 Post • June 2011 www.postmagazine.com or remote truck to booking post; tracking all the versioning and checkpoints once the master is done; and the physical and digital distribution of it.” Xytech begins with “an in-depth review” of what every cus- tomer needs to determine “how we think they can accomplish what they need” with MediaPulse, says Dolan. Some clients have had the system for a decade or more, during which time they’ve continued to fine tune it to meet the changing needs of the industry and their customers. New at NAB this year were a Web front-end solution and a back-end integration solution that extend the functionality of MediaPulse software. MediaPulse Encore introduces Sil- verlight and rich Internet application services to deliver a cloud-ready, browser-based solution that puts the software’s feature set in the hands of staff and clients alike for immediate in- formation sharing across the media en- terprise. MediaPulse Fuse connects dis- parate systems in the media enterprise. The flexible and robust platform exten- sion initiates orders, activities and con- tent movement or passively tracks digital content and creates orders from the activi- ties of the other systems. “Fuse is already rolling out, and the first Encore installation is in June,” Dolan reports.“Both are open platforms, so if a customer wanted to buy Fuse and integrate it into their digital supply chain they can do it themselves, hire a third party or use our services. We have to be tied into the hardware platform to make things easier for clients and their customers. We have to innovate faster than our clients.”