The timing of her request was fortuitous because Sun was looking to enter the digital media and broadcasting space. In 2000, DAM was receiving a lot of hype as a technology category on the brink of explosion. Back then, IDC predicted that spending on software for rich media asset management would grow from $117 million in 2000 to $1.8 billion in 2005. (It hasn’t yet, thanks largely to DAM’s continued complexity and high price tag. A 2004 IDC study revised the DAM market to top out at just under $435 million in 2005.) Meanwhile, Sun’s biggest competitor, IBM, had long offered digital media management products and devoted a division to it in 2001. To jump-start its own program, Sun agreed to pony up free professional services and equipment if WGBH would help the vendor build a reference architecture for DAM. "Developing a reference architecture is an opportunity for a vendor to figure out what is necessary to make the architecture replicable and affordable to a larger number of clients," says Forrester principal analyst Robert Markham. "That’s why Sun was willing to do this." (Indeed, IBM has its own reference architecture—or "open framework"—for digital media.)

Working with Sun to create a reference architecture fit the public broadcaster’s mission to share knowledge, but the effort would slow WGBH’s goal of getting a DAM installed because it would need to test a variety of products for interoperability, even if the station had no plans to use those products. In the end, Sun’s offer of free hardware and consulting (combined with Sun’s long-standing support for open standards and the station’s existing six-year relationship with the vendor) convinced WGBH to go along with the plan.

Even in the midst of Sun’s widely reported financial and market share difficulties, the vendor continued to support and devote resources to the project, says Rantanen, albeit fewer than when the effort began. She and MacCarn also say they felt that they knew enough about DAM to continue the effort with another vendor if they ever needed to port the system to another hardware platform. But with Sun quadrupling the number of sales, marketing and engineering staff working on the project between January and April 2005, it doesn’t look like WGBH should be concerned about Sun’s commitment to the project for the time being.

Center of Attention

Of course, WGBH had to make its own commitment. Sun handed over software and servers, but in return, it took ownership of some of WGBH’s intellectual property—including the detailed functional specifications and requirements document for the DAM system that Rantanen and MacCarn had spent years drawing up, and software tools they had developed to handle digital files. WGBH also had to share with Sun some of its trade secrets, including its processes for producing a TV show and its workflows—information, MacCarn says, WGBH certainly wouldn’t give out to, say, The Discovery Channel but which Sun would be allowed to work into solutions for the broadcast space.