Risetime: Facilitating Cloud-based Digital Asset Management

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The quantity of content and digital assets and the variety of formats companies have to manage and produce have skyrocketed. Today, several enterprises are moving to public clouds and are engaging with service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Platform (GCP) for streamlining operations. These cloud service providers not only help to integrate with existing business practices and policies for managing applications but also enable organizations to keep scaling costs low by providing appropriate resources when needed. However, certain organizations are still using outdated asset management solutions to manage their digital assets, making it particularly challenging to store, search, find, and share the specific assets they need in the cloud realm. It’s a no brainer that assets are only useful if they are secure, readily found, and delivered in the correct format. Companies need expert guidance to make sure their cloud-based asset management implementations serve them in the most effective and seamless ways possible, which is easier said than done. This is exactly what Risetime address. The company— leading the way with cloud, on-premise, and hybrid solutions—offers solutions pertaining to Microsoft, OpenText, Alfresco, AWS, and IPV technologies to various industries and companies of all sizes.

In conversation with CIO Applications, Chris Youngren, the Vice President, and Patrick Windsor II, the Director, EIM Practice at Risetime, speaks about the company’s background, the major challenges their clients generally face, and how Risetime addresses them.

Could you give us a brief overview of Risetime?

Risetime was established in 1984, Chicago, Illinois, as a traditional custom project IT services organization. 7 years ago, we underwent a massive system transition to a more robust cloud-based managed service with a nationwide support group. The nationwide support group has since expanded to a 24/7 global support center. We used our expertise in Asset Management to build our expertise in cloud migrations, deployments, security and support. This expertise and pattern is now applied to a wide range of cloud solutions. We cater to Global 2000 companies and high-end mid-market players, providing IT services such as custom application development, network design, project management, business process management, systems integration, and e-business consulting on Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

What are the major challenges and pain points that your clients generally face, and how does Risetime solve them?

Our approach, expertise and flexible model is the most efficient use of your budget dollars for specialized business solutions managed in the cloud.

We engage with our clients’ businesses right from the start and try to understand their problems. With partners, such as OpenText and Alfresco, we provide expertise to the customers on cloud deployments. From the engagement point of view, our solution follows a two-sided approach. Firstly, on the technical managed services angle, our experts make sure that all the applications are correctly deployed in the cloud to help our clients run their organization cost-effectively. Secondly, our functional managed services arm helps our customers understand the appropriate way to configure their business systems to make their organization more efficient.

We have also noticed that most of our clients tend to implement various applications into their business systems without properly understanding it.

Our operating model and approach allows us to move quickly but also adapt to our customer’s exact requirements

Also, several competitors in the market apply strict rules and use complex cloud infrastructure. This makes it more challenging and frustrating for the clients to utilize their vendor’s services, ultimately affecting the overall business process. On the other hand, Risetime takes a complete customer-centric approach. Our experts deploy the right solutions, and we continuously monitor and make sure that it adds value to our clients’ operations in the future. We address complex business challenges and enable our clients to leverage cloud services to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and simplify their entire EIM infrastructure. As a SOC Type II certified organization, our tiered cloud packages allow clients to choose their appropriate service level while increasing agility as business demands change.

For example, we had one customer who wanted us to look after their technical managed aspect. But after five months of our engagement, the client offered us to handle their functional aspect as well. Our team of experts soon worked collaboratively with them to understand and configure their business system and provided the necessary guidance for the future.

Additionally, our services are not only limited to just OpenText and Alfresco. Instead, we cater to several customers with an approach to their custom applications to deploy it in the cloud. Risetime’s team goes in as the subject matter experts on AWS and guides them in managing those applications cost-effectively.

What, according to you, are the differentiating factors of Risetime that give you a competitive edge?

We have noticed that several software vendors are entering the market to perform cloud hosting and managed services. But the main differentiating factors between them and Risetime is our ability to be agile with access to servers and how applications are implemented in the cloud. Unlike other competitors, we do not put any restrictions around the applications and allow our clients to have complete visibility for better user experience.

Additionally, on the Alfresco front, we noticed that lot of their customers had not upgraded their systems for the last 3-5 years. They are using the software versions, which are no longer supported in their respective system. When a customer hosts them, they provide one upgrade in a given year, and the rest comes under the additional cost. Contrary to this, Risetime follows an entirely different approach, where we provide all the updates to our clients for free with our managed services.

Also, Risetime has expertise in in every nuance pertaining to EIM, from hosting applications to managing services. With our contracting flexibility as an added advantage, we not only help organizations deploy these applications in the cloud but also assist them in controlling the end-to-end lifecycle of their content and all the process steps in between. Risetime acts as a true partner to its clients.

Could you cite a successful case study on how you have enabled a customer to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes?

We assisted a global food manufacturing organization facing severe issues in managing their digital assets. They needed to find a way to organize their print advertising images, which were rotated through various advertising agencies. Initially, the organization couldn’t locate their assets for a new ad campaign. So, they paid another agency to develop the assets or the images again, which ultimately made them spend twice for the same thing. It was mainly because the company stored most of its assets in the hard drives or a remote and inaccessible location. This is where we deployed a digital asset management platform, the OpenText Media Manager. We strictly followed the necessary guidelines and pulled all the assets into a unified platform so that they can reuse them to obtain a better ROI.

What does the future hold for your company?

We are focusing heavily on those customers who are unable update their system themselves as they don’t have the necessary skillsets to perform the process. We ensure that our experts manage all the applications and put it in the cloud and provide the best balance of compliance, customized control, and efficiency to the clients. We have developed several cloud-centric applications, and it doesn’t require any additional cloud infrastructure from the server and storage perspective. Adding to that, we are also using AWS Lambda, which helps us minimize our clients’ overall costs while managing their applications in the cloud.

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