Article from iframagazine.com

Interview with Steve Roessler, VP Advertising Product Management Atex

IFRA: What parts of the business does your company's business solution cover?

Steve Roessler: Our business solutions cover all the active cycle of the business processes; that means we manage the advertising sales processes, customers relationships (CRM), sales force automatisation, billing, Ad production and layout. We are offering all this also as a service (SaaS).

IFRA: What or how is the system architecture?

Steve Roessler: System Architecture provides a central database for managing all the processes, which ensures data consistency across all programs and functions. Atex offers several ways of accessing these data, either through a traditional client interface or through web services to implement advanced customization.

IFRA: Is there anythig new that you will be showing at the IFRA Expo regarding this area of your products?

Steve Roessler: At the Expo of next October, we will be showcasing our latest release of Mactive 3.1. With its new features focused on our core and online advertising solutions, Mactive 3.1 perfectly matches the Atex’s strategy: providing innovative technology for advertising media market, enabling customers to increase their revenues, to deliver better customer service, while keeping costs under control, that is to say making businesses successful.

IFRA: What is the greatest demand or challenge from the publisher side today regarding business systems?

Steve Roessler: Well there is not just one demand that we are hearing across our market segments throughout Europe. Each market has uniqueness and certain business workflows. Anyway we are seeing more of a focus on self-service portals and online. I am referring to private party, agency, commercial and internal sales portals for the sales representatives and using online to upsell into print or other mediums. In this case, our aim is to provide an easy-to-use, yet powerful and flexible, standard system, which can be used as support for interactive contribution of different users.

At the same time, we are also seeing a great demand for tools to create highly interactive Web content, in order to personalize web sites according to users’ concentric interest, while getting news in real time. This brings into play our Polopoly solution, a web content management system that allows editors to manage the content, the layouts and presentation via our thin client manager.

IFRA: Does your company outsource to newspapers the management, servers, maintenance, IT infrastructure.... needed for running a business system or you just provide the systems itself without any other service?

Steve Roessler: Besides software solutions, Atex also supports both shared services and fully outsourced operational models Software as a Service (SaaS). This means that Atex provides dedicated hardware and infrastructure software for business operations, as well as 24h technical support and administrative services. Daily IT maintenance, applications management, backups, troubleshooting and system monitoring, disaster recovery and full security control become Atex responsibility.

Page first published: 16.10.2008

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