Informa Telecoms & Media are a large and growing division within Informa, the publishing and events giant. Since the launch of the interconnect/it developed Telecoms.com, they have increasingly used WordPress to deliver business critical websites.
Since then the organisation has launched Telecoms.com Webinars – a service that allows sponsors to provide live webinars delivered through an embedded player which is managed from the WordPress back-end. This site has to be able to deliver videos to up to 500 concurrent users (think of the bandwidth requirements) and provides a live discussion forum allowing for dynamic question and answer sessions.
Going Corporate
But the most exciting news is that for April 2011 – yes, just a few days ago Informa T&M launched their corporate site on a WordPress platform using interconnect/it’s most sophisticated developments yet. Our combination of taxonomy listers (yes I know, a techie term, but stick with me), sections with their own widgets management, aggregation tools and sophisticated grid based flexible content means that their marketing department was able to build a highly featured cross-linking site for a budget way below anything that corporates would be used to.
And this brings me on to something unique about interconnect/it and our relationship with clients – we supply all our source code under the GPL license. The consequence is that the intellectual property is shared between us. Sometimes we release some in the form of plugins, and often we get to reuse our code, entirely legally and openly, to help make future projects even better.
The advantages are numerous – it means that our clients are like a collective – each one who spends money on us makes the life of all other clients potentially that little bit better – we can reuse code where necessary. That cuts costs and increases capabilities. This is different to the games industry, for example, where each publisher demands exclusive access to all assets developed. That means that 3D models of famous landmarks have been painstakingly created over and over again. Imagine the costs and waste in human ingenuity that’s involved?
Clients also benefit from a lack of lock-in. Of course, if they’re paying for all assets, that’s not a problem – but most don’t want to and, as a consequence, get completely locked in to their vendors. That’s not good – it doesn’t keep suppliers terribly sharp and can result in gouging – especially in the case of takeovers and mergers. By sharing our source code with clients, they can be assured of the ability to gain long-term support for their code, even if we changed.
We’ll carry out a full review of the Informa T&M site, what we built, and how, in the near future. But in the meantime, why not head over and see what’s there?
