It’s not often that you see a news wire agency filing
for a patent in IT. However, India’s largest news wire, Press
Trust of India (PTI) has taken a lead in making IT a profit
center from the usual cost center. PTI is looking at patenting the
latest in-house technology that they’ve developed to boost
their business.
More than 250 PTI customers including most of the news channels
and newspapers in the country and also a few globally, received PTI
news feeds through World Space radio link. However, after World
Space filed for bankruptcy in December 2009, there were concerns
over the support and services it offered. That was when PTI started
looking for alternate modes of delivery of news.
“Ever since World Space filed for bankruptcy, our strategy
from day one has been to maintain continuity and explore
alternatives (to World Space),” said Tridib Bordoloi, CIO,
PTI. “We wanted to provide an alternate delivery mechanism to
our subscribers in addition to World Space providing them the
current service. In case World Space was unable to extend the
agreement beyond March 31, 2010 at least our subscribers would not
be adversely affected,” said Bordoloi.
Finding an alternative
While Bordoloi kept looking for alternatives by talking to
telecom vendors like Essel Shyam, Airtel, HCL, Hughes
Communications etc, he realized this problem could be an
opportunity for PTI to improve its delivery mechanism. Bordoloi
then started developing an in-house software for news
development along with his internal IT team at PTI.
Within two months PTI was able to test and launch the new
software that had been developed in-house. The proprietary
content distribution application was built over Microsoft Exchange
Server and Microsoft Windows Server. It uses Internet as a mode of
delivery of news. The data is encrypted at the server and is
decrypted by the application residing at the client’s desktop
to ensure security.
PTI says that there is no recurring cost apart from the one-time
technology investment for a pair of hardware (servers) for ensuring
high availability and s/w (operating systems and MS Exchange
server), Both Microsoft and DELL are collaborating on the
technical sizing for provisioning an robust and futuristic
architecture.