SAN CARLOS, Calif. and LONDON — September 14, 2011 — News organizations globally are constantly challenged by Big Data, with pictures, video, tweets, and articles being created as quickly as the news happens. MarkLogic Corporation, the company empowering organizations to make high stakes decisions on Big Data in real time, today announced that the Press Association (PA), the UK’s leading multimedia news agency and information provider, has selected MarkLogic as the central content store, metadata repository, and syndication engine for all of its unstructured information. With MarkLogic as the Press Association’s new central content store and repository, the organization can continue to provide up-to-the minute progress on sporting events and breaking news, in a more flexible, creative, and efficient manner.
The Press Association is a global provider of news, sports, and information and is the UK’s national news agency. As a leading multimedia content provider to the media industry and beyond, the PA has an ever-increasing content library of text, images, video, and data that needs to be delivered to customers in multiple formats.
“We are always looking for the best ways to develop our technology infrastructure and deliver the best possible service to our customers.” said Andrew Dowsett, CTO, the Press Association. “Our customers rely on us to deliver a vast range of text, image, video, and data content in a variety of different input formats. The sheer volume of this content makes it a complicated task from a technical perspective. MarkLogic allows us to pull these assets together easily, providing greater efficiencies internally and more flexible services to our customers.”
The Press Association needed a technology solution that could manage all of its different content types, including structured and unstructured data. The company has a huge archive of content in multiple data formats, including articles, pictures, and video, coming in at a high velocity from different locations globally. MarkLogic Server’s ability to store this information in a schema-agnostic central repository, manage the content metadata, and make it easily accessible is the perfect fit to the Press Association’s needs. With an archive dating back nearly 150 years, this flexibility to deal with varied content types and formats is invaluable.
“The Press Association understands that the dynamics of the publishing landscape are changing,” said John Pomeroy, vice president, MarkLogic Europe. “Top publishers worldwide see the digital transition and a great opportunity to offer customers the products they want on the devices they use. With MarkLogic, the Press Association is implementing a technology solution that will enable the company to provide content to its customers in the formats they need, ultimately creating more value for the customer and the company.”
The Press Association is the national news agency for the UK and Ireland, providing a continuous feed of text, pictures, video and data into newsrooms around the country. At the heart of the media industry, the Press Association supplies services to every national and regional daily newspaper, broadcasters, online publishers and a wide range of commercial organisations. Founded in 1868, the Press Association has an unrivalled reputation for providing fast, fair and accurate information. The Press Association is part of PA Group Limited, a private company with 27 shareholders, most of whom are national and regional newspaper publishers. The biggest shareholders are Associated Newspaper Holdings Limited, News International plc, Trinity Mirror plc and United Business Media plc. For more information about the Press Association, please visit www.pressassociation.com.