Pilat Media’s new Workflow Orchestrator “dramatically simplifies the process of developing and deploying enterprise-scale workflow integrations” for its flagship Integrated Broadcast Management System, writes David Fox.
The advanced workflow integration hub is designed for the company’s IBMS:Adapt set of customization tools.
“IBMS is the industry’s most flexible environment for modelling a media company’s core business processes and helping the company adapt to new media and operational requirements — and we’ve taken that flexibility many steps further with the Workflow Orchestrator,” claimed Bob Lamb (pictured below left), Pilat Media’s CTO.
“With a new toolkit for easily adapting and extending the interfacing capabilities of IBMS, our customers are better equipped to handle the constantly changing integration requirements and the emergence of new delivery platforms and advertising opportunities.”
IBMS is a complete, scalable, integrated broadcast management system, which deals with content, ad sales and rights management, from acquisitions to scheduling, airtime and non-airtime sales, traffic, and finance. The new Workflow Orchestrator will mean that workflow or service developers can easily model, assemble and specify the activities, building blocks, and control logic required to set up an IBMS process or a service and integrate processing and workflows with third party systems.
The Workflow Orchestrator includes a set of workflow activities, a library of utilities, and a set of system services for assembling interfaces from building blocks and published API methods, in order to minimise the need for coding.
It supports a set of APIs designed to reinforce IBMS’s role as a central business system, placing extensive media and metadata repositories at the core of a media company’s infrastructure. In addition to the IBMS interfaces, clients using IBMS:Adapt Developer Edition can apply the Workflow Orchestrator to any integration and orchestration task.
“The Workflow Orchestrator takes the hard work out of connecting complex integrated workflows by leveraging the IBMS workflow as the ‘orchestrating brain’ of the multiplatform content factory or advertising business,” Lamb added. “Developers just assemble and ‘snap together’ the building blocks — and the system automatically connects external workflows via web services and external systems using our extensive range of APIs.”
The new IBMS Performance Dashboard (left) is an operational tool that ties together workflow processes and business information to monitor and display the status of multiple business processes, such as what content is available or flagging up missing rights.
Also new is the IBMS Traffic Management Console, a single point of control to drive business and traffic operations from schedule creation to reconciliation.
IBMS:InTouch (pictured top), is a new tablet-compatible order and account management console that enables broadcast sales and marketing staff to access advertising information from an iPads or Android tablet, or other devices supporting HTML 5.