Explaining What IGP Does

Infogrid Pacific have solutions for a number of digital content ownership challenges. In fact we have so many it is really difficult to explain to someone what we do. "We do content" has been used, but it is a bit of a whitewash. We are now in the age of the Infographic.

While the information on the website is reasonably complete, it is not particularly clear how the products work together, why they exist, and for whom they can work. We needed a simple and better way to reduce the yabba, yabba into something people had time to understand. It was in fact time for an... infographic! Or something like that.

After a bit of scribbling on paper the following pattern emerged, and it really did simplify the "what we do" to a simple big picture.

Of course with an infographic no long-winded text explanations are required. But I hear my keyboard calling me!

Our major solutions are in the outside ring and market segments in the main circle with of course IGP at the centre of this little universe.

There are digital content areas addressed here that people may not even be aware of. Everybody gets Publishers, but digital archives and digital libraries may be a little specialist.

Our Content Focus

Infogrid Pacific probably approaches this digital content business differently from others. We are a digital content solution provider with service capacities primarily to support our licensees. Everything is about trustworthy content ownership over time.

We focus on content of all types. We create it, process it, metadata it, deliver it and read it. We tend to stay away to the extent possible from the ERP aspects of the publishing business because there are a million companies out there who can create websites, book-stores, and workflow solutions. There are not many companies with real depth in content production tools for print and digital delivered content, plus trustworthy archiving, controlled access and channel controlled delivery to reading systems. We tend to be able to do very complex (when required) processing, re-purposing and packaging of content very easily because it is what we have done for a very long time.

The Content Users

Digital Archives

The padlock icon is there because the primary responsibility of an archive is preservation. Even at the cost of making the content unavailable for access.  That is of course historical archiving and while the documents that are sealed in the underground vault and not to be touched for 100 years has not changed, access to digital replicas has changed this operation significantly in the last decade.

The IGP primary solution overlap with digital archives are:

IGP:ECMS Solutions for the trustworthy storage of content in accordance with the ISO13537 (CCSDS 520.1-M-1) model for those interested in such things. There is more metadata for high-end digital archiving than you can dream.

IGP:Digital Publisher for creating, processing and metadata'ing that content to the required archiving standards.

Digital Libraries

Libraries are almost the opposite of archives in that their mission is to make content accessible and available. That is why they get the open door symbol. But there are many libraries that also have serious archiving function as well. It can be difficult to get the balance between the preservation of historical masterpieces and giving researchers and interested people access to that content. That is why the dark ominous "dark segment" overlap area is in between these two digital content areas.

Digital libraries have developed in academic institutions.

The IGP primary solution overlap with digital libraries are:

IGP:ECMS Solutions for the controlled storage and access of content.

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment for the delivery of content to consuming audiences. Digital libraries often have closed registered user policies.

Publishers

Publishers get the dollar symbol. Publishing either saves or makes money for an organization, depending on the type of publishing. Without publishing there would be nothing to archive* and nothing in the library. 

There are different types of publishers. Our user manuals are published to make it easy to share information between licensees and this blog and our main branded website are there to

We have a particular involvement with education and training publishers. Providing both digitization solutions and services.

The IGP primary solution overlap with publishers and publishers are:

IGP:Digital Publisher for production of print and ebooks while maintaining the content as trustworthy and reusable.

AZARDI: Content Fulfilment for ePub distribution to controlled channels, primarily education.

IGP:Distribution Manager (not shown because it would have cluttered the graphic) for distribution of files and heavy ONIX metadata to e-Retail and POD operations.

Infographic Over

Having been in the digital content production, management and distribution business since 1993 (if you count a few years mucking around with CD-ROMs), and being a practitioner rather than a marketer I have always had a resistance to the elevator pitch. What we do is just too darn complicated to be reduced to a single statement.

20 years on and we have a jolly infographic to explain what we do, how we do it and why we do it. The elevator pitch would now appear to be "We create solution rings around digital content ownership challenges".

Better ideas welcome!

 

Posted by Richard Pipe