Nine Major Dailies Migrate to MerlinOne Hosted Systems

By: E&P Staff Nine newspapers are migrating to fault-tolerant, hosted systems from MerlinOne, Quincy, Mass.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star, Dallas Morning News, The Providence (R.I.) Journal and Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise are on Merlin hosted systems.

The company said it anticipates at least another six major dailies will switch to the hosted service in the first quarter of 2010. The newspapers join 14 corporations and law firms using Merlin Hosted systems -- organizations ranging from National Public Radio and Harvard Business School to Pfizer and The Humane Society of the United States.

"News organizations will be able to have a world-class hosted picture desk and multimedia-capable digital asset management available to their users without the capital burden of continuous server and storage upgrades, without IT department workload, and with totally predictable, low costs," MerlinOne President and CEO David Tenenbaum said in a statement. "We expect virtually all of our newspaper customers to switch to Merlin Hosted over the next three years."

By switching, all the newspaper's data is moved to the MerlinOne data center, where the technology cuts the storage required for a newspaper's digital objects by up to 70%. Merlin hosted systems are physically housed in a U.S. hosting facility with high security, generator backups and connections to four Internet backbones. MerlinOne will provide performance guarantees, fault tolerance and an interface to prepress production systems. Merlin customer service staff will directly support end-users.

A complete digital asset management system, Merlin allows users to organize millions of photos, video and audio files, graphics, stories, PDF files and Microsoft Office documents using fast, precise searching with drag-and-drop workflows.

MerlinOne also will host its Trax assignment and workflow system, which supports photo, video, story, audio, graphics, scanning and research assignments. Trax integrates with Merlin, adding rights management, scheduling and contact information.