WAVE Action—The Banta Acquisition One Year Later

By Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor

August 26, 2004 -- A little over a year ago, WhatTheyThink published an interview with Banta’s John Sisson and WAVE Corporation’s Ward Wright following WAVE’s acquisition of Banta’s B.Media content management solution. We recently checked in with WAVE and Sisson to get an update on what’s new with B.Media.

The Cambridge Crew

Industry veteran Sisson is now Vice President of Sales for Banta’s Book Group in the Eastern Region, and he reports that the company has consolidated its remaining content management activities—meaning sales and anything else that has to do with B.Media—in its Chanhassen MN division. This includes the Catalog and Database Services group which has historically relied heavily on B.Media.

Prior to being acquired by WAVE, B.Media’s home was in Cambridge MA, under the auspices of Banta Integrated Media. The Banta team worked closely with WAVE during the transition, but Sisson indicates that the Banta B.Media development crew chose to stay in Cambridge, many of them moving to Banta’s Internet development group rather than relocating to Orlando, FL, where WAVE is located. Since the transition was completed, the Banta Cambridge team has been busy developing Banta’s Sync Interactive Marketing Suite, a Web-based multichannel publishing system consisting of four modules that share a common user interface:

• Sync Print, a customized, personalized Web-to-print engine that includes the ability to make brand-managed templates available to field sales professionals, agents and franchisees for localization, customization and print on demand;
• Sync E-Mail, for creation and distribution of customized, personalized HTML or text opt-in e-mail campaigns;
• Sync Web, which facilitates the development of customized, personalized landing pages; and
• Sync Fulfill, a combination of a front end literature management solution and a back-end print, kitting & fulfillment and distribution capability.

On to Orlando

WAVE, now with a staff of 22, is at its heart a technology company and prides itself on its unique ability to acquire promising, but somewhat disadvantaged, software solutions, refining them both in terms of the stability of the underlying code as well as an increase in functionality. WAVE demonstrated this talent very effectively following its acquisition of digital asset manager MediaBank, which is doing well for WAVE in the marketplace. In fact, Charles Roberson, WAVE’s U.S. Channel Manager, reports that privately held WAVE has experienced 100% year-over-year growth in license revenues, with gross revenues increasing over 50%, largely attributable to the MediaBank family of products.

WAVE operates primarily through channel sales, preferring to leverage the systems expertise of its worldwide dealer and systems integrator channel than to gear up with a direct sales force on its own. Roberson said, “We have had more success in collaborating with our partners and customers than any other channel I have ever worked with. We don’t have a cookie cutter approach to our channel strategy, and we vary our program based on who we are working with and their level of expertise. Our channel includes consultants, conventional resellers, distributors, and systems integrators. We also see a significant amount of collaboration among our channel partners, as they leverage each other’s strengths to design and implement the best possible solution for the end customer.” Geeter Kyrazis, WAVE’s Director of Business Development, added, “What we are seeing in the field are highly integrated solutions. It is not just a matter of pushing a box across the table.”

In researching this article, I spoke with Mel Ettinger, President of Exanet’s Digital Media Division, one of WAVE’s partners who has integrated its storage solution with MediaBank to serve a customer with just such a complex need According to Ettinger, “We have a MediaBank/Exanet installation in a California photo lab that supports the company’s Virtual Photo Lab, a solution that allows photographers to upload images to its site, and then use that site for preparation of images for the photographers’ customers. It combines their proprietary image manipulation tools with MediaBank and seven terabytes of Exanet storage. Seven terabytes sounds like a lot, but this lab has a large number of clients with a very large number of high quality images.”

WAVE is currently preparing for its Annual Partners’ Summit, being held in Majorca September 22 nd and 23 rd. The session will showcase a new release of MediaBank, the latest news about B.Media, and will offer an opportunity for channel partners to learn from each other’s best practices. The company is also launching a consulting practice to supplement the efforts of its channels for complex situations.

B.Media Update

WAVE has spent the last year—both in conjunction with the Banta Cambridge team and on its own once the transition was completed in December—getting its B.Media house in order. This involved ensuring that all customers were upgraded to the most current release, putting support agreements in place where possible, and in some cases, redeploying the installation. One customer, a large supplier of school supplies, had been using B.Media in one division. However, as an aggregator, the company had grown to nine divisions since the original deployment. The WAVE team has been in the midst of a nine-month consulting project there to build a universal, centrally housed database that can be utilized by the entire organization Kyrazis says, “We have been working hard to stabilize the customer base and build good will. It takes time when there is a transition of this nature, because you need to build trust and confidence, and customers have lots of questions about what we are going to do long term.”

In terms of the application itself, WAVE’s first task was to replace as much of the third-party content as possible with modules designed by WAVE. Kyrazis says, “We developed a new Java client so that B.Media can run on OSX. We replaced all of communications infrastructure - the middleware - using a commercial version of CORBA and our own communications infrastructure. All of that reduces our dependence on third party licenses, gives us more control and greater flexibility with the product, and keeps the costs in line. One of the biggest things was that we replaced the imaging engine that B.Media was originally built on with the MediaBank imaging model. That is huge; it makes our development efforts more efficient, and will enable cross-functionality between the products over time. It will also give B.Media users lots of new capabilities, including such things as multi-page thumbnail images.”

Roberson added, “B.Media is not a ‘black box’ anymore. As file formats change, we have access to the data streams, which we didn’t before. We have one imaging engine for both products and the interface will be much better. We’re giving our B.Media users better previews and image mapping. And the merging of functionality between the two solutions is starting to happen. For example, in the next MediaBank development cycle, we are thinking about incorporating B.Media’s whiteboarding function, among other things.”

As the outcome of this work, the B.Media 5.0 release is scheduled for the partners’ summit in Majorca. In addition to the changes cited above, 5.0 includes a complete redevelopment of its Quark extension to a full-client implementation compatible up to Quark 6, and within a few weeks, the product will be in beta with a full-client InDesign plug-in.

Support for Standards

WAVE was also happy to report that it has joined both CIP4 and NGP, with plans to be actively engaged as JDF and other standards continue to evolve, building full compliance into its product line and contributing to the standards development effort. Kyrazis said, “We joined NGP so we could make sure that we can provide as much integration with third party workflow solutions as possible. We have had a lot of customer requests for MediaBank/workflow integration.

Roberson added, “With respect to CIP4, we believe that the creation part of the specification is not well defined. We want to get involved in how JDF will be interacting with very early stage production tasks, including design. There is a big opportunity for us to work with both CIP4 and NGP, and to look at being the solution that sits at the front end, providing security and allowing users to track all of the components that become documents that ultimately become production.”

Kyrazis pointed out that the JDF job ticket itself does not really have a home, and that in his opinion, just passing the JDF through the production process, without retention in some sort of centralized repository, is risky, both from a security and reliability perspective. He says, “What if I want to look at the job ticket a year from now. MediaBank has a JDF module that will allow viewing of the entire JDF job ticket. It can archive both the complete job and the JDF job ticket so that if you are looking for it later, whether it is offline on tape or accessible on disk, you have access to exactly the same information you had the last time it was produced.”

Roberson continued, “Today, JDF is being implemented on a job by job basis, not on a longer term basis. There is no overarching system that can track that through the life of the content. The MIS system does the initiating and arbitrating, but it has nothing to do with archiving and storage. In our vision, the MIS system will initiate the job and communicate directly with MediaBank to create the job jacket, populate the job with metadata, and when job is ready for production, MediaBank can communicate directly with the production workflow. That’s what people want.”

What Will the Future Bring?

Roberson and Kyrazis indicated that WAVE is opportunistic relative to future acquisitions. Kyrazis said, “Digestion of these types of products is a big job, and we are getting through that with B.Media. We now have a strategy and structure in place that is proven to work, and we are open to thinking about future acquisitions. The current economic envi ronment, in conjunction with the cultural shifts we have undergone in our industry in the last five to eight years, have yielded a lot of technology that is a good value. We’re keeping our eyes open.”

This report was written by Cary Sherburne. She can be reached via email at cary@sherburneassociates.com, online at www.sherburneassociates.com and by telephone at 603-430-5463.