The Telegraph thunders into next phase of DAM strategy

The Daily Telegraph's installation of a Picdar DAM solution in 1996 was one of the first in the UK.

Since then, the nation's best-selling daily broadsheet newspaper has realised the anticipated two year payback and made further investment in Picdar solutions to strengthen its digital picture service to production.

The successful implementation of this imaginative concept, originally started in 1995, has encouraged the company to move to phase two which included upgrades to both servers and storage.

The hardware elements - Sun E3500 enterprise servers and Sun A5000 storage - were seamlessly integrated into the existing solution by Picdar.

It is an investment which, in IT Manager Malcolm Day's words: 'has significantly improved our service to Picture Desk people. Searching is fast,' says Day, 'and returns hit lists with the relevant assets to the desktop remarkably quickly. It is easy to navigate within the database to find the right assets, and to follow the workflow history between assets, other publications and previous usage.'

Bob Bodman, who is The Telegraph's Picture Editor, is also emphatic about the success of their DAM solution. 'We originally evaluated four different suppliers and selected Picdar because of their professionalism, experience in the newspaper industry and the energy with which they addressed our requirements. It was not all plain sailing and we worked together to fine tune certain aspects to match our practical requirements.'

'When you consider,' continues Bodman, 'that we had been spending £900 a day on photographic consumables alone, a cost we have literally eliminated, it can be readily understood how we anticipated a two year payback. And, we have all the benefits now of a fast archiving, storage and picture retrieval facility. It is the basis of what could become a powerful Web Syndication operation. With an increasing number of images being added to the library - currently between 1,700 and 2,000 a week - we are already up to 650,000 newsworthy pictures on the database.'

The Picdar systems, however, are at the heart of a vibrant picture management business which proficiently delivers more than 3,000 incoming wire photos and Telegraph digital images each day and manages the growing digital library.

'It seems a long time since our initial evaluation,' says Malcolm Day, 'but it is very satisfying to realise that we have hit our financial forecasts'.