Data Analytics Capabilities Come to the Cloud

Imagine Communications, provider of media software and networking solutions, launched LandmarkOSI 8.0, the latest advance in the company's Landmark enterprise software portfolio, which manages more than $25 billion in annual advertising revenue worldwide.

"Today's media companies would prefer to spend time growing their businesses using effective sales, traffic and billing processes, but they are burdened by complex, proprietary systems from multiple suppliers," Steve Reynolds, chief technology officer at Imagine Communications, said in a statement.

The newly launched LandmarkOSI in the Cloud is designed for use in multichannel environments and across diverse geographies. LandmarkOSI provides broadcasters, networks and content distributors with advanced and innovative sales, CRM, traffic, billing and data analytics capabilities to efficiently manage station inventory and increase revenue.

LandmarkOSI is powered by MediaCentral, an IP-based framework for migrating and optimizing media and playout functionality to a virtualized cloud environment. With this, customers have the flexibility to leverage an integrated, end-to-end platform for advertising, traffic, automation and multiservice playout as their needs evolve.

Some key advantages of LandmarkOSI in the cloud:

Provides a centralized information hub and database, allowing content management, sales, traffic, and scheduling to work together to optimize inventory utilization and sales resources, as well as eliminating duplicate data entry and automating routine tasks that free users to focus on revenue-generating activities;

Improves the flexibility to launch new channels, scale to handle new content, and deliver cross-platform services;

Offers expanded features and functionality, such as geo-redundancy and high availability which enable industry-leading Disaster Recovery configurations;

The Live-Update live log editor features maximize revenue with instant bidirectional communications;

Ensures a faster, smarter workflow and allows master control teams to stay focused on high-value tasks like prepping content for playout.

By leveraging Microsoft (News - Alert)'s cloud platform Microsoft Azure, LandmarkOSI in the cloud provides customers access to significant cost-savings and flexible deployment models, empowering them to more quickly adapt to new business models and delivery platforms.

"Imagine Communications is taking advantage of Microsoft Azure resources and capabilities to deliver a higher level of consistency, agility and service velocity to its customers," said Tony Emerson (News - Alert), Managing Director, Worldwide Media and Cable, Microsoft Corp.