As magazines move beyond running print articles on online, they’re asking managed service providers to help run increasingly sophisticated Web sites. That’s the experience of The New York Internet Company Inc., which this week announced Web management deal with US Magazine.
Phillip Koblence, vice president of operations at NYI, said media companies are dramatically expanding content, rolling out interactive features such as polls and reader forums. As a result, media customers are “focusing on more complex hosting scenarios,” he explained.
Media has become a larger part of NYI’s revenue in recent years. The company’s services include managed services, colocation, dedicated servers, Web hosting and e-mail hosting. “It’s certainly growing,” Koblence said of the company’s media business. “The focus of a lot of these traditional media companies is on … making a more interactive community to keep the attention span of what used to be print media readership.”
The Media sector covers not only publishers, but the companies that support them. NYI, for example, provides managed services to Daylife, a content services company that targets news organizations and other media companies.
Other recent media moves demonstrate a willingness to outsource.
- Equifax Database Services, a provider of database hosting services, reported a deal with Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. to support the publisher’s direct marketing and list rental businesses.
- Playboy Enterprises Inc. said it has agreed to outsource all magazine functions — other than editorial — to American Media Inc. According to a company statement, the objective is to significantly reduce its cost structure.
Additional Approaches
Side note: Nine Lives Media Inc., MSPmentor’s owner, leverages a range of internal and external services. Internally, we conceive and/or select all of the key software services that plug into our web sites. If we’ve done our early homework correctly, our site developers can take that blueprint and piece all of the software components together into well-designed media sites. We also outsource our site hosting to two separate service providers. One is a traditional hosting firm; the other is a cloud firm that virtualizes our site, allowing us to scale up or down based on daily traffic. Assuming our cloud and virtualization tests go well, we may standardize on that approach in 2010.
By John Moore with Joe Panettieri. Follow MSPmentor via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; and Twitter. And sign up for our Enewsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com.
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Posted In: Service Level Agreements | Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: Managed Service Provider | Managed Services | MSP | New York Internet Company | US Magazine
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