Mid Day Combines SOA and Web 2.0 Technologies to Reap Big Savings

Summary:

Laboring to meet the deadline, Mid-day’s editorial staff were galled by the time they wasted waiting around for stories or photos. The CTO, Nirwan Biswas created a piece of middleware using SOA(service-oriented architecture) design principles and integrated it with web 2.0 technologies. Read this case study of how the newspaper did so and save Rs. 60 lakhs

Highlights:

Mid Day, used SOa to decrease waiting time in the tabloid’s busy news room and introduced productivity gains worth rs 60 lakh. Mid Day’s system enabled instantaneous access to editorial material and trimmed the man power, time and effort needed to put together the newspaper.

Reader ROI:

How to combine a SOA plaform with Web 2.0 How to overcome the challenge of business process mapping

Organization: Desks groaning under the weight of press releases; reporters scribbling frantically as they cradle phones against their heads; copy editors punching away furiously at their keyboards; and editors pulling out their hair in frustration. Everyone has an eye on the clock, watching the minutes tick closer to deadline.

omains. “With the help of SOA any Mid-day location can access the architecture over the Internet.”

That’s life at a newspaper. It’s a pressurecooker. But it doesn’t have to be, not accordingto Nirwan Biswas, CTO, Mid-day. Owned by a subsidiary of Mid Day Multimedia, which also owns Radio One and Inqualab Quam (an Urdu daily), the Rs 102 crore Mid-day has been a fixture in the lives of Mumbaikars for over 25 years, thanks to its quick-reading format. In the last decade, the paper’s popularity has spread. Today, it has four editions in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Pune, with a circulation of over three lakh.

Business Case: But for an easy-read paper, it was maddeningly hard to produce. Take for example when the paper’s photographer went abroad for a shoot. Until he got back into office, parts of the paper practically came to a grinding halt. With no pictures, page layouts were almost impossible to finish. Neither was it possible to e-mail over a GB worth of pictures. Even when the photographer walked into Mid-day’s office, “he needed to burn the pictures on a disc and send it across to the right department. The cost of storing and transferring these pictures and maintaining a warehouse full of discs were all additional expenses,”  says Biswas. In a world where speed is of essence, the time spent waiting was galling. And although the editorial team had found a way to work around the system for years, it affected their productivity. More than once, editorial staff were forced to either wait for images until the last moment or send pages to the press minus images, which were sent separately. This didn’t leave the people at the press end of things happy because it slowed them down.

omains. “With the help of SOA any Mid-day location can access the architecture over the Internet.”

Project: Aware of the frustration the system built among Mid-day’s 600 staffers and how it affected their productivity, Biswas decided to fix the situation. He created a piece of middleware using SOA (service-oriented architecture) design principles and deployed a system that would provide a loosely integrated suite of services that could be used by multiple business domains. “With the help of SOA any Mid-day location can access the architecture over the Internet,” he says.

Challenges:While the world is arguing over how Web 2.0 and SOA have significantly different elements and cannot be regarded as ‘parallel philosophies’, Biswas used Web 2.0 technologies as a front-end to an SOA back-end. His user interface used Web 2.0 technologies like RIAs (rich Internet applications), mashups, Ajax, RSS, REST (representational state transfer) to help create a rich and interactive front end to SOA back-end systems. But without an existing SOA implementation he knew about to refer to, Biswas’ work was cut out for him. Business process mapping was a major challenge, he says. And employees across various teams had to be trained to use the new interface effectively.

Benefits:The hard work has reaped rich dividends. Now all a photographer has to do is upload pictures and editorial staff can view them in real time. The same logic applies to stories that different bureaus want to share. Biswas’ SOA system enabled instantaneous access to editorial material and trimmed the man power, time and effort needed to put together the newspaper. In terms of ROI, the Rs 16-lakh project, saves Mid-day close to Rs 60 lakh a year. “More than the cost saving, it has introduced an efficiency factor of 24 percent,” says Biswas. Now that the SOA project is off the ground, Biswas is layering it with an internal messenger service which has cut communication costs by 60 percent. “I made sure that all communication, including video conferencing, is done at a single node instead of different pipes so that bandwidth is used as per demand,” says Biswas.