And now for something different:
Here are some interesting statistics I received recently in my role as Application Support Manager at MerlinOne:
Since January 1, 2012–
22,744 distinct user logins
412,150 total logins
Items viewed: 695832
Downloads: 335010
Normally I write about DAM (digital asset management) related topics. This week, my musings are sort of related to the Merlin DAM product.
The stats above are from our electronic tearsheet service, E-Sheets. If you have some publishing background, you may know what I am talking about when I talk about tearsheets. Specifically, a tearsheet refers to a printed page torn from a printed publication. Tearsheets are used by advertisers as proof of publication. One-upon-a-time someone would rip apart a printed publication, stuff envelopes with the pages and mail printed ads to advertisers and ad booking agencies as proof that the ad ran. Typically, advertisers don’t pay their bill until they receive the proof of publication. Tearsheets may be saved by photographers for contests as similar proof, or hung on the wall as a souvenir (as I wrote about recently).
Ripping pages was really old school. Well, MerlinOne has been doing electronic tearsheets for a long time; it is not old school, but advertisers accept it and it just works. Publishers send us PDF versions of their published pages and the ad booking data from their advertising system. We put the content together. With our easy-to-use interface, advertisers, agencies and publications can easily retrieve their ads. We provide automatic emailed notifications of published ads and even provide an (optional) electronic invoice. It is a rock solid system that our customers love.
One of the things we do well at MerlinOne is leverage technology from one area to another. When we identified a need in our original core market for an easy way to modernize the tearsheet process for the digital world, we leveraged the powerful indexing and search capabilities of Merlin to build a world-class electronic tearsheet solution for publishers. Merlin E-Sheets currently has over 200,000,000 records (yes you read that correctly, 200 MILLION) in its advertising database. Something we are so proud of, we created a counter on the www.merlinone.com website to track the site’s growth. Searching across nearly 200 million records can be as fast as our DAM customers search across 200 thousand. That’s leveraging technology.
One of the things we developed specifically for E-Sheets is our proven MSync technology. This is a system of fully redundant servers that mirror each other and may be used in an active-active fashion. Any updates made to one server are reflected in the other. Not only the database entries, but also the thumbnails and high-resolution original files. It is pretty cool technology. Well, MSync is so cool, we started offering it to our Merlin DAM customers. They loved it. It allowed them to formulate an easy to use disaster recovery (DR) plan. More leveraging of our technology.
Our E-Sheets site is hosted. That means it lives in a secure Internet co-location facility. The facility has at least 5 public backbones from different vendors to the Internet, backup power and is quite secure. As our customers looked for ways to manage not only their digital assets better, they were looking for ways to manage physical and personal assets more effectively as well. We studied it and started hosting Merlin DAM customers. That means that in addition to allowing Merlin DAM users to host their content locally, we now provide a cost-effective way for us to host their Merlin’s for them. MerlinOne staff takes over the day-to-day monitoring and maintenance of our customer’s dam system. Who better to manage a Merlin than the Merlin experts? That’s even more technology leveraging.
And we continue to leverage our technology. We identified a need in the legal industry for an easy-to-use and cost-effective e-discovery solution. This is a tool that allows attorneys to examine thousands if not millions of documents as part of the trial preparation process.
We developed Level Review, an integrated solution that allows attorneys to review, analyze and produce relevant documents. And again, we leveraged core MerlinOne technologies. Our long-tested index and searching, our hosting expertise and our support of new technologies, like our speech-to-text support for video and audio files.
We continue to cross-pollinate from one product to another, and our customers reap the benefits. As we develop features in one area, we look for ways to migrate those useful features to other products to improve the overall user experience. Now that’s leveraging!
Merlin, E-Sheets and Level Review… better products at competitive prices.
For more information about:
MerlinOne DAM and E-Sheets visit us at www.merlinone.com
Level Review, our e-discovery solution visit www.levelreview.com