M+E Daily

By Mel Lambert

“Tracking physical goods and digital media through the supply chain has close comparisons with traditional transport infrastructures,” says Paul Lavery, director of solutions enablement, supply chain, with Axway, a software and services company with more than 11,000 customers in 100 countries. “Just as FedEx and UPS, for example, use closely monitored tracking utilities that let their customers know exactly where every package is anywhere in the world, there are a number of track and trace solutions that the M&E industry can use to streamline delivery of its assets, whatever the methodology.”

Axway offers a range of products, solutions and services that enable business-critical transactions within and among enterprises, while providing management, security and governance on interactions throughout business networks. “We offer a highly flexible framework that rapidly integrates and connects cross-business applications, processes and industry services within and outside the enterprise,” says Lavery, “thereby effectively extending an organization’s existing infrastructure.

Within a motion-picture studio, Lavery offers, “there are a number of delivery mechanisms for finished products during their production life cycle. There are dichotomies throughout traditional media-delivery solutions, not to mention off-market media such as Netflix’s physical delivery and video-on-demand services, with delayed release to different geographic regions.”

Axway specializes in data management and data integration for such media and entertainment supply chains, as well as supply chains in other industries. “We know how to capture metadata from digital assets and match a client’s specific tracking and delivery requirements, using adaptive mapping sequences,” Lavery says. “But we aim to work with what is in place, and adjust to the pace of the slowest platform.” Axway’s Synchrony is a multi-enterprise service-oriented framework that enables customers to integrate and complement existing infrastructures using a “start-anywhere/use-anything” service model.

“Metadata is the ‘secret sauce’ that lets us develop an information system for generating and tracking such information across multiple delivery channels,” Lavery notes. “In addition to the tracking assets for package-delivery companies, we also offer solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, which is highly regulated. To streamline time-critical deliveries [the drug industry] uses standardized label formats and barcode identifications. The M&E industry shares a lot of parallels, with its dependence upon metadata, watermarking and targeted lifetimes.”

Registered in France with a U.S. headquarters in Phoenix, Ariz., Axway offers B2B integration, managed file transfer, secure email, business operations monitoring, process management and identity-validation solutions, as well as professional and managed services, cloud solutions, and software-as-a-service. Synchrony-powered solutions can be deployed and managed through a variety of delivery channels, including software, on-premise appliances, SaaS, Hosted, and VMWare.

Mel Lambert is principal of Content-Creators.com, a Los Angeles-based consulting service.