Accumedia?s software aids content-heavy Web sites

BOULDER ? Venture capital is hard enough to come by for most start-ups, but newcomer Accumedia Corp. was able to secure a seed round and a new chief executive officer all at once.

Ed Williams believed in Accumedia’s product and potential for success so much that he left Arch Venture Partners, where he was a partner, and joined the software developer in August 1999, bringing with him part of a $2.75 million round of financing.

Tantalus Partners of Colorado Springs and Ohio Partners of Columbus, Ohio filled out the rest of Accumedia’s seed round.

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Since its launch, Williams said the company has raised an additional $5.3 million and is contemplating additional funding to help it reach profitability by the end of the year. Accumedia has 26 employees, and Williams said the company plans to add more this year.

Accumedia offers a solution for media and entertainment companies trying to find their way through a Web of confusion in order to manage and deliver content more efficiently and effectively. “The solution is about getting content to customers or markets and doing that with the highest quality, the most flexibility and at the lowest cost,” Williams said.

Williams said the Accumedia Convergence Platform (ACP), a software platform for multiple-service modules, is the solution. Williams said it can help any organization for which content is its primary product. “This approach is important to the (media) industry, because they are looking at profitability and cost first and creativity second,” Williams said.

Service modules provide content management, media-asset management, personalization, content delivery and media commerce and advertising. Clients can mix and match modules, implementing one or more at a time and adding as their needs change. Williams said it takes Accumedia two weeks to three weeks to turn on another module.

There are software developers providing products and services similar to Accumedia, but according to Williams, they do not offer them as one complete package, nor do they offer them for the same price. “We’ve yet to see anything on the market that addresses the media industry in as optimal a fashion,” he said.

Williams said Accumedia’s solution is three to four times cheaper than other providers. Over a three-year period, the solution costs a client approximately $1.2 million, compared to about $3.5 million with a traditional systems integration approach. It also is more flexible. “We take the services, software and hardware, and integrate it. The customer doesn’t have to worry about it and can get performance and cost savings,” he said.

What makes this possible are Accumedia’s Content Management & Delivery System and Producer’s Workbench. The content-management component uses a browser-based interface to make the process of developing content, managing it and modifying it easier for non-technical users. The workbench component extends Web-authoring tool Dreamweaver Ultradev to make the process of building and maintaining Web sites faster and easier.

The solution has the capacity to deal with any type or volume of content, according to Williams. “Content users want to use and access content anywhere,” he said. The software is so adaptive that businesses can pilot different types of revenue and business models, generating profit through ads, subscriptions and syndication of content or commerce.

The solution’s flexibility is built around repurposing content. “It bridges the offline media with the online media,” Williams said. Williams said it takes about 28 days on the low end and four months at the high end to bring up a site.

Accumedia has six clients, including one local client, Internet Gift Registries, an affiliate of the Modern Bride Group, which is based in Denver. The Modern Bride Group is owned by Primedia and publishes Modern Bride magazine. It will use Accumedia’s software platform to consolidate its online operations, which consist of modernbride.com, marryingman.com and weddingnetwork.com. Williams said the system will go live June 30.

To enhance the capacity of its platform, Accumedia has formed several partnerships. In May 2000, the company formed an alliance with Engage Inc., integrating its online marketing solutions EngageAdManager, Engage AudienceNet and Engage Knowledge into the Accumedia Convergence Platform. In December, Accumedia partnered with Vignette Corp., a supplier of e-business applications, integrating the Vignette V/5E-business Application Platform into the ACP.

Accumedia’s ACP solution is adapted directly to a client’s business model. Accumedia charges an initial service fee to implement the solution and train users. Clients are then billed for the solution on a monthly basis. Depending on the number of page views a client’s site receives and which aspects of the solution they employ, Williams said the solution costs about $4,000 per month at the low end and extending as high as $50,000 per month.

The cost of the solution may seem steep initially, but according to Williams, use of the ACP can reduce a company’s overhead substantially. Take a process in Quark, for example. Without the ACP, Williams said a company could have between three and seven people extracting content and putting it on the Web. With the solution, one person could do the same job ? and in a shorter period of time. The solution compresses the steps, so a project that would normally take a few days to complete can be done in a few hours, according to Williams.

Contact Anjanette Mudd at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail amudd@bcbr.com