10

The

th

annual
review

Digital Solutions in India 2015

< />

Digital Solutions in India 2015

A decade of coverage on Indias digital solutions industry

Charting the Transformation in

Digital Content and Solutions
By Teri Tan

cover photo istockphoto/nevarpp

he first PW coverage of the India-based digital solutions industry, which was then
widely known as content services, coincided with the launch of Twitter and Googles
acquisition of a 22-month-old startup called Android Inc. The iPhone and iPad were,
respectively, one and four years away from being launched. Social media didnt exist,
phones were mobile but not yet smart, and life was just fine.
The year was 2006, and our report,
titled Content Services and Printing in
India, focused on print- v. content-centric
workflows, with conversations revolving
around XML, PDF, and e-deliverables.
Also included was a Know the Lingo
sidebaron SGML, XML, front-end
XML, DTD, batch publishing, 3B2, TeX,
and LaTeXto explain the acronyms and
new workflows, for the benefit of those
who were about to embark on the content
digitization path.
The fact that XMLwhich was introduced 20 years ago, in 1996was a focus
10 years ago, and has since become nearly
ubiquitous, drives home the point that
new technology often comes fast and
furious, while adoption tends to be slow
and sporadic. Costs of shifting to a new
technology or workflow aside, change is
truly scary for those operating in the
legacy print-centric publishing world.
In the case of XML, it really is a necessity
for ensuring content neutrality, reusability, and multiplicity, while preventing
content obsolescence. In short, XML is
required for content longevity and healthy
bottom lines (or even survival) for publishers. And that has been PWs main
message right from the start of its
coverage.
Since 2006, the conversations have

been expanded to cover content mobility

(with e-books, e-learning, and mobile
apps), cloud technologies, accessibility,
Big Data, and discoverabilitythus
reflecting the tremendous shifts and
transformation in digital solutions services, publishing models, and consumer
demands. The industry is now focused
on intuitive and dynamic workflows,
interactive and integrated media, scalable and customized solutions, aggregated and dechunked data, single-source
and multipronged processes, and agile
and mobile technologies.
In our inaugural report, 20 companies
talked with us about their domain expertise, and about short-term initiatives
and long-term goals: Cepha, CyberMedia
Services, DCS BPO, DiacriTech, Hurix,
IBH, ICC, ITC, Innodata Isogen, Integra,
KGL, Lapiz Digital, Laserwords,
Macmillan India, Newgen Imaging,
Planman ITeS, SPi, Techbooks, TIS, and
Thomson Digital. Some of these companies have since been acquired or merged
into bigger entities, some remain under
the same ownership and have grown
steadily, and a few have rebranded
themselves extensively. Meanwhile, new
entrants continue to make their presence felt. In total, the 10 reports
(including this issue) have featured 58

companies, many of which have become

preferred vendors for major publishers in
different market segments.
In assessing potential report participants, we look closely at whether each
company really has the expertise, secure
facilities, and workforce to make good
on its promises. To this end, we typically
spend at least two weeks in India every
year, visiting more than two dozen
vendors and writing about those with
track recordsor with potential, in the
case of newbiesthat show theyre
capable of partnering with publishers
and content creators/aggregators on
content digitization, distribution, and
monetization.
While this issue celebrates 10 years of
covering the digital solutions industry,
PW is focused, as usual, on looking ahead
to a future that is both exciting and uncertain. There will be new technologies that
both require and drive the creation of even
more agile content, and disruptors such
as wearables and mobile walletshello,
Apple Watch and Apple Paywill
become mainstream.
On the following page, weve asked
nine vendors to share their thoughts
about the industry back in 2006, the
changes theyve seen since then, and
what lies ahead.
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

I thought print would be obsolete and XML-first workflows would be a done deal for all publishers.... TODAY,
publishers who hesitated with XML workflows might find that HTML5 provides the type of interoperability required for
content distribution. Or it might not.... There is no simple, single answer for all publishers. But what we continue to
observe is that print drives digital, and digital drives print. And, no matter where the markup language is implemented
in a publishers workflow, it is definitely implemented. Marianne Calilhanna/Cenveo Publisher Services
We bookmarked PDFs and called them e-books, and migrated from desktops to tablets. TODAY, we have
many e-book formats while content for school and college is being developed with the tablet in mind....
Those were the days of SGML, and then came XML, which was used to render HTML pages. Although ePub
is a fancy word for advanced HTML, the fact remains that digital delivery has evolved in every aspect, with
complex interactivity and media-rich components becoming the norm. A.R.M. Gopinath/DiacriTech
I believed that content is king, and that content would always be the prime mover.... TODAY, content is a given.
It is now about solutions. It is about technology, and how it enables content discovery, learning outcomes,
platforms, and digital books. And so Integra has evolved along the same line to become a digital publishing
solutions company.... Content by itself will fail in this digital environment. It is nothing without publishing solutions.
I definitely did not imagine a scenario like this 10 years ago. Sriram Subramanya/Integra Software Services
I was at Aptara, trying to figure out how to convince publishers to use XML at the front end
of their processes. Nobody knew what user experience design meant, and cloud referred to
those watery vapors floating in the sky.... Over the past decade, technology has undergone
significant changes, and this has impacted the industry, with mobile transforming the
experience for both businesses and consumers.... TODAY, we have built so many innovative
solutions for the mobile platform that could not have been even envisioned 10 years ago.
Gurvinder Batra/KiwiTech

10 years ago
We were three employees with four computers. I remember training my receptionist in project management when
we landed our first conversion project.... TODAY, our 1,000-plus personnel operate from three delivery centers in
India to answer all types of publishing needs. We are still growing, learning, and improving our process flows....
Gone were those days when I used to say, We are a part of a chemical company but we can set your pages in
Quark and InDesign. Indira Rajan/Lapiz Digital Services
Digital was largely uncharted territory, and we were focused on engineering production workflows for content distribution.
Then, as digital content evolved to become a much more interactive experience, we introduced frameworks to accelerate
development such as our Question Authoring and Delivery tool, now used for over a million assessment items.... TODAY,
the focus is on sophisticated and adaptable learning platforms for smarter content integration. It is about understanding
and merging pedagogy and technologyand that is in our DNA. Samudra Sen/LearningMate
Who could have imagined the extent of our dependence on smartphones, tablets, and e-readers? The adoption
of cloud technology, strides in e-learning, use of social media, and the sophistication of mobile apps are
pressurizing publishers to monetize digital content and change their business models.... TODAY, we find ways
to do things more efficiently, and we forge great relationships with publishing clients and help them to identify
additional revenue opportunities. We think forward, and we think for them. Vinit Khanna/OKS Group
We would not have thought that e-books and e-publications would be the way they are today, or become so
prevalent. Or that we would be able to consume content on the go via e-readers, tablets, and phablets.... TODAY,
increasingly, the changing publishing landscape is going to be about multichannel content distribution with faster
time to market.... Technology is indeed wonderfuland pushyand it will drive us, more than ever before, to be
nimble, agile, and innovative. Vinay Singh/Thomson Digita
Typesetting mostly used proprietary workflows and licensed packages.... TODAY, authoring has gone online with Overleaf
and Authorea while platforms like Mendeley and ResearchGate allow researchers to share published data. Between
authoring and sharing, there is publishing. Can these three worlds become one? At TNQ, we see a space where we, and
our soon-to-be-launched open platform, Author Caf, serve a meaningful online collaboration that enables authors to
research, organize, write, cowrite, cite, and publish. Yakov Chandy/TNQ

GLOBAL

TALENT

EXCELLENCE

TIME

TEAM

CLIENTS

SKILL

WE DELIVER
CONTENT
SERVICES

KNOWLEDGE

GOALS

REACH

QUALITY

VISION

DIGITIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, PUBLISHING SERVICES...

Mauritius

Solutions to address your Business needs

Mauritius

Mauritius

Digital Solutions in India 2015

Digital solutions vendors are outdoing themselves with

unique tools, innovative solutions, and increased automation

Meeting the Demand for More

Agile and Mobile Content
By Teri Tan

en years ago, it was all about content conversion and e-deliverables. Today, the digital
content proposition is no longer as simple. Smartphone-totting and tablet-hugging
consumers demand screens tailored to their preferences, with content custom-made to
suit their needs and delivered via a seamless interface that provides a flawless user
experience. Some also want to be able to comment and participate in the content creation and
development process.

Which means, content now needs to be curated, customized,

converged, and cloud-based. Content is definitely moving from
mainstream distribution to direct-to-consumer; it is becoming
more platform-based and app-centric, with an increasingly
digital-only reader experience. So, publishers and content creators/aggregators big and small are racing to achieve faster
times to market; to develop a better understanding of their
consumers; to serve ever more customized, agile, mobile, and
intuitive content; and to monetize engaged readers.

Automation Saves the Day

Many small publishers, says Nishith Arora, chairman of MPS
Limited, are leveraging technology to rationalize and automate
the author-to-reader processes. They are starting to do away
with ad hoc publishing workflows with manual tracking
systems, and with decentralized and disparate systems that
are often redundant, tedious and error-prone with ineffective
reporting mechanisms. The anticipated benefits from adopting
publishing technology platformsfaster time to market, for
instancehave driven these companies to overcome the size
constraints while encouraging them to think strategically.
MPSs flagship publishing management platform DigiCore,
for instance, has effectively shaved the production time at one
small U.K.-based publisher by 50% within a year.
For SourceHOV and its sister company Rule 14, a Big Data
specialist, the shift to automation has resulted in more content
6

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

creation and enrichment projects. The applications for Rule

14 within the publishing environment are tremendous, explains
Nakul Parashar, v-p of ECM at SourceHOV. Rule 14 uses
natural language processing and supervised machine learning
to automatically extract relevant datastructured or unstructuredfrom different Web sources and captures the clientprescribed information. We are seeing some very interesting
products emerging from direct Rule 14 application, as publishers
begin to integrate their legacy information with real-time data
to provide a current context.

Analytics and Mobile Holding Sway

Big Data and analytics, says CTO Gurvinder Batra of KiwiTech,
will play an even more important role in user acquisition to
help companies learn more about existing users and recruit new
users. M-commerce will continue to grow as mobile payment gets
wider adoption. We should also be seeing more mobile-vehicle
integration, and more business-related apps as companies turn
their focus onto internal data acquisition, performance monitoring and efficiency improvements via mobile platforms.
In e-learning, analytics and Big Data are hot topics because
everyone wants to measure how effective content is, the efficacy
of content, and how students and teachers are performing. The
information gathered gives a lot of insights into how content
will be designed, delivered and consumed in the future, says
CEO Samudra Sen of LearningMate.

Digital Solutions in India 2015

Mobile delivery, Sen says, will continue to be one of the hot
topics along with cloud-based curriculum, instructional technology, adaptive learning and competency-based education.
So we are seeing more clients turning to us with projects
focused on building solutions with personalized learning
capabilities, more advanced delivery mechanisms, and data
and analytics.
Smartphone and tablet users will expect to get more out of
their devices, and to have more access options wherever they
happen to be at any given time, adds Batra, pointing out that
wearables, which are hot now, will see huge developments
going forward.

Digital is (Totally) in Play

With mobile solutions facilitating learning on the go and semantics adding meaning to content, the bond between content and
technology has gone beyond digital access, observes assistant
v-p for marketing and pre-sales Uday Majithia of Impelsys.
Content is becoming complex and technology-agile.
And it is not just pure-play publishers needing a digital content strategy in place because as Majithia puts it: Anybody
with contenteven manuals or training materialsis exploring
ways to enrich the content and deliver it effectively. So content
is paving the path for innovation in technology.
For executive director Vinay Singh of Thomson Digital, the
next three years will usher in even greater demand for faster
time-to-market, which means that digital content delivery
will be the preferred method instead of print delivery. Wider
adoption of smarter and cheaper hand-held devices will further
increase the popularity of e-books while lower production costs,
greater creative control and better royalties will lure more authors
into self-publishing. Understanding these market probabilities

and trends, adds Singh, is crucial to shaping our company

strategies on areas such as e-books, dynamic digital learning
resources and rich-media content development.

Opportunities (and Challenges)

Pave the Way
Now that we have smart e-readers with HTML5, JavaScript,
and CS3 to make ePub interesting, e-book apps may be phased
out sooner than expected unless the app gives superior capabilities, says executive v-p A.R.M. Gopinath. Technology has
enabled the creation of complex interactivity, which is then
embedded into online courses to offer a more engaging reading
experience. We are certainly seeing more publishers coming to
DiacriTech, seeking ideas for enhancing their LMS content and
platform, and ways to retain reader engagement.
Over at Cenveo Publisher Services, senior director for global
content services Waseem Andrabi definitely sees adaptive learning
continuing to gain traction throughout 2015, with learning
opportunities pushing into new frontiers including virtual reality.
More publishers, he says, will consider continuous publication
models rather than packaging products and publishing periodically. The rise of smartphones and tablets as the primary user
interfaceinstead of PCs or laptopsmeans that content has
to be structured for seamless data interchange across media and
devices. Such transformative publishing requires publishers
to constantly evolve and transform workflows to remain relevant.
The content itself needs to transform as well.
But all these emerging opportunities and new market trends,
coming together at the same time, can be distracting and often
overwhelming. Publishers are losing the forest for the trees
when they focus purely on cost and less on quality, cautions
CEO and chairman Vinit Khanna of OKS Group, whose team

Online Coverage of the Digital Solutions Industry

The following articles are available online in conjunction with this print report:

Expertise on Display: Projects Showcase (featuring

unusual and complex projects from various vendors)

Digital Solutions Industry: Then, Now and the Future

(a brief take by Nishith Arora, chairman of MPS Limited)

NEW: The Expert Series

This is a debut series, penned by invited vendors, that examines critical topics impacting both the publishing and digital
solutions industries. Here are the first five articles:

Digital Discoverability by Kannan Narayanaswamy, CEO of ePagemaker (a Newgen KnowledgeWorks company)

Personalization and Customization in E-Learning by Prasad Mohare, v-p for publishing at LearningMate
Using Mobile Apps to Increase Content Monetization by Gurvinder Batra, COO and CTO of KiwiTech
Markup Standards for Books and Journals by Evan Owen and Marianne Calilhanna, v-p for publishing technology

and

marketing director, respectively, of Cenveo Publisher Services

Workflow Management that Works by Rahul Arora, CMO of MPS Limited

Visit www.publishersweekly.com/digitalsolutions2015 for more articles in the Expert Series and continuing coverage, as
well as news on the digital solutions industry.

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

Digital Solutions in India 2015

is focused on creating a better product more efficiently so that
publishers can grow end-user customer satisfaction, and revenues through product, service enhancement and quality. We
encourage them to see that they do not have to sacrifice one for
the other.
Balancing cost and quality has always been a major challenge
for any publishing or content companies. For the following 18
vendorsa small sampling out of hundreds of digital solutions
companies thriving in Indiaautomation, innovation and persistence are the key to their competitiveness (and survival). Their
unique capabilities, if not already evident from the following
pages, shine through in the challenging and interesting projects
they have delivered and explained in online article Expertise on
Display: Projects Showcase.
This reviewwhich remains as unscientific as it was 10 years
ago, and not rubber-stamped with our endorsementis totally
discriminating in that it features only vendors that appear on
our radar, and caught our eyes with their novel solutions, unique
workflows, and interesting proposition on dealing with the
constantly changing content, consumer demands and technologies. Whichever vendors you choose as your digital content
partners, you must do your due diligence, because only you
know what works best for your content and how best to move
your company forward.

Cenveo Publisher Services

Marianne Calilhanna, Cenveos marketing director, believes
tools for researchers and authors are becoming increasingly
important. Todays researchers and authors are computersavvy, and they expect to have access to tools that they can use.
So when we offered publishers Smart Proofan
online proofing and correction tool that is a part
of the Cenveo Publisher
Suitethe reception
was overwhelmingly
positive. At the end of
the day, authors simply
want to communicate
their ideas, and they
want to be in control of
that communication.
The Cenveo Publisher
Suite, adds Calilhanna,
Marianne Calilhanna,
marketing director at
Cenveo Publisher Services

Digital Solutions in India 2015

Solutions Beyond
Expectations

OFFSHO
RE
ONSHOR
E
HYBRID
eBooks/ePub3/HTML5
iPad & Android Apps
Project Management
Content Development

(Writing, Editing & Accuracy checking)

Composition
Design & Illustration
True XML First Workflow
NIMAS Conversion

is developed with the core objective of

delivering quality content as fast as possible. What is important to our publishers is editorial integrity, and fast
delivery of structured, high-quality content. We push publishing back into the
hands of those that matter mostthe
editors and authorsand with that, the
black hole of vendor processing becomes
transparent, consistent, predictable, and
nonthreatening. Through tools such as
Smart Edit and Smart Proof, we put the
power in the authors hands, and we provide publishers with the confidence that
our tools will manage the content structure while the authors manage the content. The Cenveo Publisher Suite has
been proven to reduce turnaround time
by up to four days, reduce errors during
proofing, and allow for creation of new
products and deliverables on the fly within
one to three days.
Meanwhile, Cenveos Digital Content
group is busy designing learning products
to help the 21st-century learner succeed.
Online courseware, quizzes, learning
apps, games, simulations, you name it.
Their quest is to bring learning opportunities to where the learners are. Hence
the groups mantra, design once, deploy
everywhere. All our e-learning modules
are packaged in contemporary interfaces
that are smooth and easy to navigate,
explains Waseem Andrabi, senior director
for global content services.
As for growth segments, Calilhanna
sees the opportunities in digital fulfill-

ment and content-management archiving,

and cloud-based software as a service.
Complex project management and
custom-built architecture for publishers
that cannot afford to hire such resources
in-house is also big. These are the areas
that Cenveo is working on while continuing to improve our turnaround time
to publish quality content with a faster
time to market.

DiacriTech
DiacriTech, a niche player implementing
a LaTeX environment, has been busy
trying various ways to best utilize the
platforms math capabilities to achieve
better output for clients. We have a
direct-LaTeX workflow alongside an
XML-first system, which enables us to
work on author-supplied LaTeX files
without disturbing the macrosand yet
have XML in the background for quicker
digital output without compromising
data integrity, explains executive v-p B.
Mahesh, whose team has been using LaTeX
for STM projects and K12 math.
Augmented reality (AR) is another
specialized service that DiacriTech offers,
especially to publishers wanting to
increase sales of their print products by
incorporating digital elements. Adds
Mahesh, We have been working on AR
in various applications for different industries, and we are now harnessing those
experiences to help publishers by providing higher-impact visuals to entertain,
brand, and educate. Being a full-service

+91 44 4288 9000

www.diacritech.com

a division of diacriTech

+1 617 236 7500

www.laureltech.com

(From l.) Madhu Rajamani, A.R.M. Gopinath and B. Mahesh of DiacriTech

Digital Solutions in India 2015

provider means that we have the ability
and resources to conceptualize and design
AR elements into the workflow, or to
transform static print products into visually entertaining content.
Then there is testing of developed content. Aside from the usual UI/UX [user
interface/user experience] and functionality checks, we also help clients to determine if hints provided in an assessment
are helpful enough, ascertaining the contents complexity, or to check on the
validity of an iterative algorithm, for
instance, says executive v-p A.R.M.
Gopinath. We also hire university students on a part-time basis to test and
provide feedback on various parameters
such as assessment speed, result accuracy,
platform intuitiveness, and subject understanding. These results will then be used
by publishers to determine if their digital
platform or LMS [learning management
system] is ready to be deployed.
Meanwhile, the companys whitelabeled platform, Ssparkl, now has an
upgraded interface that is much smarter,
more colorful, and intuitive. The versatility in enabling offline reading via the
Ssparkl app, or online reading via the
browser, is the biggest strength and differentiator. More publishers have been
adopting it, and we are constantly
improving the interface based on the
feedback that we are receiving from the
market, adds Gopinath, who is looking
into expanding DiacriTechs onshore and
offshore services for project management,
copyediting, and proofreading.

Hurix
Multiplatform publishing solution
Kitaboo continues to make headlines for
Hurix, which was recently recognized by
the World Education Congress as one of
the 25 best e-learning companies. Last
year, Kitaboo won the coveted Brandon
Hall Gold award in the category covering
mobile learning technology; the year
before, it won silver for the best advance
in content authoring technology. Awards
aside, big names such as Hachette Livre/
Grupo Anaya, Gyldendal (Norway),
McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson
Education, and Scholastic Media have

Subrat Mohanty, CEO of Hurix

been using the Kitaboo platform for the

past few years to leverage mobile technology for interactive learning.
Kitaboo allows publishers, institutions, and corporations to seamlessly collaborate, share, and publish interactive
content in real time, says CEO Subrat
Mohanty, adding that the platforms capabilitiesenhancing content for interactive learning, creating assessments, delivering on mobile devices, enabling social
learning, and tracking user engagement
are exactly what is needed in the current
technology-based education industry.
The latest version of Kitaboo, which is
cloud-based and aptly named Kitaboo
Cloud, brings a complete end-to-end
e-book solution where the conversion,
distribution, and delivery takes place
entirely on the cloud. So anyone with an
Internet connection and a valid account
can access Kitaboo to meet their digital
conversion and distribution needs.
Sixteen clients have already signed up to
the cloud version.
Kitaboo Clouds social learning and
collaborative features, explains executive
v-p for sales and product solutions
Srikanth Subramanian, allow students
to share and discuss subject matter with
their peers and teachers, and this is very
much in line with what is actually happening in classrooms all over the world.

Digital Solutions in India 2015

The detailed e-book analytics, on the other
hand, allow teachers to gain a quick snapshot of student engagement ahead of time,
enabling them to plan for group discussions and problem-solving exercises.
Again, this feature addresses the current
teaching methodology, as well as the
evolving needs of teachers.
Another cloud-based platform, Dictera,
complements Kitaboo by facilitating
authoring, management, and publication
of e-learning content in HTML5. We
have optimized various features within
Dictera for both online and device-based
content delivery. Its server architecture
has also been revamped to be much more
scalable on AWS [Amazon Web Services],
making it easier and more affordable for
wider adoption, adds Mohanty, who is
looking into introducing Kitaboo and
Dictera to training companies, corporations, and institutions.

Impelsys
Flexibility is the hallmark of iPublishCentral, Impelsyss flagship product that allows
publishers to make component-based
choices that fit their unique e-book delivery
requirements. Over the years, we have
fine-tuned it to proactively meet publishers growing demands, explains assistant v-p for marketing and presales Uday
Majithia, adding that the SAAS (software
as a service) platform is now in its sixth
version, with the new release focusing on
Impelsyss mobile-first initiative to enable

Uday Majithia, assistant v-p for marketing

and presales at Impelsys

publishers to offer readers easy purchase,

navigation, and search options of e-titles
from their mobile devices.
The next version is already underway,
and it will be focused on further
enhancing the reading experience. Other
features that will be included are ancillary content support, an enhanced ePub
reader, social features such as note and
bookmark sharing, and additional
reporting tools for administrators, says
Majithia, adding that another deliverys p e c i f i c solution from Impelsys,
KnowledgePlatform, helps users to create
customized portals to manage their complex e-content and e-learning modules.
These two platforms, he adds, are built
to support the convergence of e-books
and learning, and have empowered our
vision to spread knowledge through
technology.
Meanwhile, Impelsyss SEO and social
media marketing (SMM) services have
been ramped up to aid content discoverability. Says marketing manager
Shubha Khaddar: We help publishers
strategize, promote, and market their
content on multiple social media channels.
We also develop strategies to build a publishers brand and content presence
through effective conversation with
readers. In fact, our SEO and SMM services are specifically designed to get
e-books to potential readers. At the same
time, we offer effective marketing strategies and help in implementing agile
marketing methods that quickly adapt a
publishers strategy to the changing
marketplace.
The transformation in the publishing
worldfrom being publishers to
becoming educational companies that
focuses on learninghas been keeping
Majithia and his team busy devising
innovative solutions that accelerate
online learning. The savvy users expect
solutions to encompass reading, learning,
and everything in betweenall available
through a seamless single solution. So
our solutions now support an integrated
learning experience and adaptive
learning pathand we are at the right
place at the right time to help publishers
do just that.

12 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

Integra Software
Services
Buying back Barings 60% stake in the
company was all about our confidence
in ourselves and in our clients, employees,
and the marketplace. Furthermore, the
radical changes in educational technology
and publishing space offer tremendous
opportunities, but for us to be able to
make quick decisions to take advantage
of those opportunities, we need operating
flexibility and autonomy, says Sriram
Subramanya, managing director and CEO
of Integra, pointing out that during its
partnership with Baring from 2006 to
2014, the company grew threefold.

Anu Sriram and Sriram Subramanya of

Integra Software Services

Expansion of its Chennai production

facility, for instance, is aimed at meeting
those needs. It was set up in 2006 to focus
on complex editorial work and valueadded services that may require a specialized talent pool out of Chennai, explains
Subramanya, who is planning to add
another 100 members of staff, including
instructional designers, subject-matter
experts, and design specialists, all to cater

Your K-20 Education Partner

Partnering with the K-20 education

industry to design and deliver
innovative curriculum and assessments,
personalized learning experiences and
integrated, intelligent data systems;
LearningMate blends pedagogy and
learning design with progressive
technology and engineering solutions
to connect todays learners, educators,
administrators, policymakers and content
creators with the information, tools and
solutions they need to be successful.

LEARNINGMATE.COM
sales@learningmate.com

OUR SOLUTIONS
Adaptive Learning
Assessments
Authoring Tools
Content Development
Data & Analytics
Editorial
HTML5

Instructional Design
Media Development
Mobile Frameworks
Product & Platform
Development
System Architecture
& Engineering

Digital Solutions in India 2015

to clients e-learning requirements.
Integra has invested over $5 million
in honing its digital and technology capabilities over the past five years. Some of
the products and platforms that resulted
from this investment include iPubSuite
(for authoring-to-packaging delivery),
iCorrectProof (online author-proofing),
iRights (rights and permissions), iAM
(digital asset management), and iPubMagic (ePub conversion). Subramanya adds:
The investment is ongoing, and we have
carefully chosen areas where we can be
the trusted partner to clients.
Rich media licensing, he adds, is
growing fast. As publishers push to distribute diverse content over many digital
formats, there is an increasing need for
licensing content such as audio, video,
and apps. Strong negotiation skills are
required to obtain the best licensing terms
and fees for our clients.
Setting up its own content innovation
lab is another way to meet market
changesand challenges. Research and
product development for key areasadaptive, game-based, and experiential
learning; augmented and virtual reality;
and testingis crucial for the growth of
Integra and for our role as a strong valuecontributor to publishing clients, says
co-founder and human resource director
Anu Sriram, who is also working on
ensuring continued expertise development in areas such as editorial and project
management. Generational change in
our thinking and our approach to meeting
market expectations is crucial as digital
products continue to gain momentum.
We also need to capture talents among
the millennials as we move forward.

Jouve India
Thirteen is a lucky number at Jouve India.
We acquired 13 new French customers
in the past two years, and we have been
providing them with services such as
multilingual composition, template creation in 3B2 and InDesign, and e-book
production in ePub and XML, says CEO
Sanjiv Bhatnagar, who has also acquired
four new German clients with projects
requiring similar services to the French.
We are also on the verge of signing two

Sanjiv Bhatnagar, CEO of Jouve India

more from the German-speaking region.

So, our French- and German-language
projects have grown significantly.
Not surprisingly, the teams collective
expertise and experience in multilingual
editorial processes are further strengthened by JouveEdit, a Word-based online
portal that controls and streamlines manuscript development processes. JouveEdit
offers a collaborative framework for
editorial teams, freelancers, and authors
throughout the manuscript development
lifecycle. We have built in intelligent
automation for manuscript preparation
tasks and for enforcing publisher-specific
manuscript standards and styles. There
is also automatic file versioning, file
naming, and storage, among many other
features, adds Bhatnagar. JouveEdit is
used by one of the worlds largest trade
publishers, and its capabilities have been
tested and proven. But there is always
room for improvement, and the next iteration is in the making.
Then there is JouveStudio, an automated typesetting service for print and
digital based on InDesign. Projects parsed
through JouveStudio are simultaneously
generated in three versions: paper, standard digital, and enriched digital. What
it means is that clients will get direct
access to the combined expertise of our
300 prepress and typesetting specialists
via an online collaborative platform. It is

14 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

a one-process, one-contact
platform for production in
your language.
As for key growth areas,
Bhatnagar says that there
has been a significant
increase in projects dealing
with content development,
which require his team to
modify existing content to
suit specific digital platforms. Projects requiring
the creation of assessment
items to allow teachers to
monitor student performance via online platforms
are on the rise as well.
Indirectly, these growth
areas demand HTML5
expertise since this standard
offers the most flexibility for content
development, production, and analysis.

KiwiTech
The past year has seen a spike in Webbased projects at KiwiTech, causing its
Web team to more than double in size.
This year, we see our focus on building
complete ecosystems for clients that will
include both mobile, and Web-based
front- and back-end, says CTO Gurvinder
Batra. Publishing, he adds, is still
KiwiTechs core business, and industry
veteran Byron Laws recently joined our
team to provide us with an even better
understanding of the evolving technology
needs in the industry. In the medical
publishing segment, Batra says, mobile
content and apps are going from nice to
have to must-haves. Medical research
tends to be time-sensitive and the practitioners are very busy. The need to stay
informed within their specialties means
consuming contentnot just text, but
also rich images and videoson the go.
Smartphones and tablets with higher
screen resolution are perfect for such content, and more than other verticals, this
field can afford to pay for both device and
content.
In the meantime, testing is becoming
a critical service as devices, platforms,
and hardware grow even more diverse.
Each mobile project that we do needs to

Digital Solutions in India 2015

(From l.) Gurvinder Batra, Rachna Chauhan, and Mohsin Syed of KiwiTech

have a documented test plan covering all

aspects of the app functions and user sce-

narios. The extent of the testing depends

on various factors, including the type of

application, target audience, network

connectivity, and distribution channel.
We do UI testing, integration testing,
sanity testing, user-acceptance testing,
and many more that are all done manually
today, says Rachna Chauhan, director of
PMO and testing, adding that her team
is currently working on automating
testing using various tools.
The companys new partnership model
for startups (see The Startup Model at
KiwiTech, p. 16) has provided Mohsin
Syed, senior v-p for strategic partnerships,
and his team with some very exciting and
challenging projects. Meeting our commitment to deliver best-in-class technology
solutions and a great client relationship
experience this year means expanding our
capabilities in delivery, operations, and
sales and marketing. Our headcount is
set to grow 25% this year to about 350
people, and we will be relocating to a new
office with better infrastructure within
the next few weeks.

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

15

The Startup Model at KiwiTech

Digital Solutions in India 2015

Entrepreneurs, says CEO Rakesh Gupta of KiwiTech, frequently devote so much of their time to raising capital that
their vision suffers and their momentum is lost. The cost of
establishing a startup may have declined in recent years, but
technology development expenses have increased in the same
period, he notes. Sometimes, even the most innovative and
well-managed startups lack adequate access to technology
talents, capital, or networks. In fact, given the extremely low
appetite for risk among investors, especially those outside of
the San Francisco Bay Area, seven in 10 startups are either
moderately or significantly underfunded.
Recognizing the challenges faced by todays entrepreneurs,
KiwiTechs founding teamwhich created the publishing
services company TechBooks, or Aptara, as it is now known
has leveraged the companys decade-long expertise in content
and digital technology to partner with selected technology
startups. The whole idea, Gupta says, started when one of
KiwiTechs clients, Ruckus Media Group, offered to pay for
development costs in equity alongside cash. We liked that
idea but instead opted for convertible note, he recalls.
Since then, Ruckus Media, which specializes in creating
award-winning interactive apps designed to entertain and
educate children, has signed up with many more publishers.
In addition to various standalone titles, Ruckus apps have
delighted children with interactive storybooks featuring
favorite brands (Hasbro, Crayola, and SeaWorld); introduced read-along e-book versions of perennial favorites

Lapiz Digital Services

Software development expertise has been
a major focus for CEO Indira Rajan and
COO V. Bharathram in recent years. The
main reason is because, sometimes, a client
is not willing to outsource the software
development part, especially when it is
a proprietary or highly sensitive project.
So we have scaled up our software expertise, and should a client require a contingent workforce, then we assign these
developers to work directly with them,
says Rajan, adding that the software team
is about to launch a set of device-agnostic
e-tools.
These are interactive educational widgets that can be used across titles to
enhance the reading experience. They are
designed in such a way that they are
generic and customizable with minimal
effort in order to make it affordable for
our clients. One of the e-toolsa file
convertercan convert legacy Flash files

(Curious George, Tom and Jerry, and Scooby-Doo); and created original content with top entertainment names (Butch
Hartman and the Wiggles). It has also worked on video episodes from the best in childrens TV and music, such as Sid
the Science Kid, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That,
and Kidz Bop.
From the Ruckus Media experience, we obtained great
insights that served as an extended due diligence on a company and its products and services, Gupta says. For our
startup partners, we provide in-kind subsidized technology
development, enterprise-level contacts, and capital investment.
Recently, KiwiTech launched a venture capital fund
aptly called Kiwi Venture Partnersthat focuses on seedstage companies in the digital technology space. Besides
Ruckus, it has invested in other innovative startups such as
Loopster (multiplatform video editing tool), Sensery (CRM
system for wealth management), Hello-Hello (language
learning app), Librify (social reading platform), PuzzleSocial
(social game developer), and Brilatta (hotel housekeeping
app).
These partnerships, Gupta says, are also helping KiwiTechs enterprise clients, who are looking to stay competitive
via innovation from some of these startups. We are leveraging
on our own proven entrepreneurial track record with Aptara
and now KiwiTech to help othersthe startups and our
enterprise clientsto succeed.

into interactive HTML5, giving clients

the ability to reuse existing files in a different format that is compatible with new
devices, explains Bharathram, adding
that Lapiz offers enterprise app development services, including mobile strategy
consulting, design and development, QA,
and marketplace deployment.
In the coming months, Lapiz is set to
launch several new products, including
a production workflow modelwhere
testing with HTML5 is nearing completionand a mobile-based learning management system. Rajan says: We have
also developed a Moodle-based content
management system that will take advantage of our cloud-hosting capabilities.
The features are not limited to Skype and
social media integration, and it fully supports educational widgets.
Lapiz continues to receive new orders
for manga conversion. We have added
interactivity in panel viewing of comics,

16 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

V. Bharathram, COO of Lapiz Digital

Services

Digital Solutions in India 2015

but the biggest challenge lies in making
sure that the files and any features added
will work in newly released devices, adds
Rajan, whose team has started working
on Open Journal Systems (OJS), a workflow for streamlined management and
publishing of peer-reviewed journals. It
is something new, and for us, this is part
of the continuous learning process. This
is how Lapiz has grown in the past: our
clients recognize our relentless efforts in
upgrading ourselves, and they value our
track record of delivering projects on time
and within budget.

Shaping
Your
Digital Future

LearningMate
A new version of GoClass, LearningMates
mobile platform for the classroom, with
a cleaner and more intuitive website, was
launched in January. The instruction
capabilities have also been expanded, and
instructors can now lead class sessions via
PCs, laptops, or Chromebooks using the
platform, which was previously restricted
to tablets. For the advanced version of the
platform, GoClass Plus, we have rolled
out small-group instructiondeveloped
in collaboration with a new program in
Arizonathat allows instructors to segment students into groups to explore
concepts, improve collaboration and teambuilding skills, says CEO Samudra Sen,
whose team had partnered with Leading
Edge Series to produce a television segment highlighting the benefits of using
mobile technology in the classroom.
Meanwhile, LearningMates Big Data
driven learning solutions for the Arizona
Department of Education (ADE) have
been tremendously successful. ADE CIO
Mark Masterson says: Our continued
partnership with LearningMate, along
with substantial legislative support, has
begun to yield amazing results. The teams
technical savvy has allowed Arizona to
provide interactive dashboards to nearly
500 districts and charters via a best-inclass secure access system. Their determination has transformed this ambitious
vision into a reality that is impacting
children in the classroom. A total of 35
dashboards with 190 different views have
been deployed, and are currently accessed
by more than 40,000 users.

Content
Solutions

Technology

Samudra Sen, CEO of LearningMate

Common Core is another big segment

for LearningMate, where the team is busy
redesigning programs and writing technology-enhanced assessment items. We
have been doing a lot of question authoring
and writing core curriculum that needs
to be aligned to Common Core standards,
says Sen, whose U.S. office has expanded
from one person to more than 50 over the
past six years.
We have made being closer to our
clients a huge priority. We have people
from the editorial world and those from
the technology side sitting in one place,
allowing us to unite those skills and come
to the table with a new and holistic perspective on education. We have made
strides in consulting, and in advising
clients on complex digital solutions. Few
companies can match those capabilities,
or offer the diversity of skills that we
have, Sen says.

Commerce

Social
Digital
Products

MPS Limited
The latest news out of MPS Limited is its
acquisition of U.S.-based TSI Evolve, a
publishing services company for the education market segment. This acquisition
further strengthens our presence in North
America and enriches our portfolio in the
school publishing market, in particular
in the reading segment, says chief marketing officer Rahul Arora, adding that
MPS has exceeded $250 million in market

luminadatamatics.com
W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

17

Digital Solutions in India 2015

20032004
Universities acquire LMSs. >> CMSs
are at their peak. >> Online components
are ancillaries to print books. >> Publishers rely on LMSs to deliver and distribute
digital products.

THE

E-Learning
EVOLUTION

20082009
Mobile reading devices appear. >> Digital
products gain traction. >> A realignment
occurs within the publishing industry:
some divisions of large publishers are
sold or shuttered, while others reemerge
with a stronger digital focus.

20052007
LMS adoptions continue in higher
education. >> Online courses
appear. >> First-generation
adaptive testing platforms,
simulations, and scenario-based
learning emerge. >> Summative/
formative assessments go online.
>> Content interoperability
standards are adopted.

Text courtesy of
Samudra Sen/LearningMate

capitalization. Both organic and inorganic

growth across all MPS business units have
been aggressive in recent years, with the
acquisitions of Element LLC and EPS in

Nishith Arora, chairman of MPS Limited

20132015
Digital becomes the mainstream. >>
Technology-enabled assessments,
competency-based learning, digital
workows, and MOOCs emerge.
>> Adaptive testing and analytics
evolve. >> Efcacy and outcomes
measurement in education begins.
>> Content, assessment, and data
standards are adopted. >> Common
Core is introduced. >> New standards
prompt computer-based assessments.
>> Publishers are reorganized as
digital-solutions-driven companies. >>
Digital revenues grow.

20102012
Digital-rst products and e-books become the
norm. >> Mobile reading devices appear in
classrooms >> Theres a move toward more
scenario-based learning models, simulations,
and personalized learning. >> The ipped
classroom model is popularized. >> Publishers
are restructured for increased digital investment.
>> Cloud and mobile solutions become viable for
curriculum delivery. >> Social learning constructs
enter the education system.

2013 and 2014, respectively. We have

the widest range of service offerings
possible in a solutions provider, and we
are in a strong position to meet rapidly
changing requirements from the publishing industry, Arora says
Meanwhile, solving the biggest issue
in publishingtime to markettakes
the center stage. To do that, we need
technology, Arora says. But results are
achievable only if the applied solutions
are smart, intuitive, and user-friendly,
and the average user is able to leverage
it. Our cloud-based MPSTrak has many
of these attributes. He cites the partnership with a U.K.-based leading STM
publisher as an example of strategic technology implementation to reduce time
to market. We replaced the publishers

18 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

12-year-old legacy production management system with MPSTrak, and integrated it with their internal systems for
charging information. It was a significant
change for a company that produces 80
journals and upwards of 8,000 articles
per journal annually.
Aroras team has also implemented
various DigiCore components such as
DigiXML, MPS Trak, and DigiEdit to
help one small Australian publisher with
manuscript submission, peer review, content creation and management, and production tracking processes. At the end,
it is all about automation, accountability,
efficiency, and transparency that lead
towards reduction in publishing time and
labor cost, Arora says.
Meanwhile, software development,

For All Your Digital Needs

Interactive Digital Content,

Applets, and IWB Solutions

Asp.Net, MVC, C#, Ruby on Rails,

Python, Wordpress, and Moodle

Fixed, Freefow, and Manga Conversion

Simple to Interactive eBooks

Apps and Game Development

A

Typesetting Services,
XML First, and Proprietary Workfow

XML, HTML, and

Special Conversions

www.lapizdigital.com

Digital Solutions in India 2015

branded under MPS Technologies, has
grown exponentially in the last six
months. Two exciting projects with a
leading Australian medical information
providerfor the development and implementation of a content-creation system,
and content-delivery system, respectivelyleverage several modules of our
flagship DigiCore platform. We created
seamless and integrated systems that provide faster time-to-market workflows,
Arora says, adding that the innovation
from the software development unit has
broadened the reach of analytics platform
MPS Insight into the library market.

Newgen
KnowledgeWorks
The challenge of getting the right content in front of the right consumer at the
right time informed a number of developments at Newgen in 2014, president
Maran Elancheran says.
One of these initiatives was the creation
of a Web-based platform that brings
together authors, marketing personnel,
and others involved in the publication
process to collaborate on enhancing the
discoverability of books online. The
platform helps authors and publishers
to create and manage a professional website, blog, and e-store without the need
for any technical background or design
skills, and provides social tools to boost
digital engagement with readers.
Crucially, it makes development of a
coproduced discoverability strategy part
of the publishing workflow, where various
people are already engaging with the
content, rather than viewing it as a separate activity. Postpublication, this platform provides a single dashboard view
of performance across media and channels, Elancheran says.
The theme of removing barriers
between content and the reader does not
only apply to books. Patrick Martinent,
CTO of Newgens CloudMatters subsidiary, and his app team spent much of 2014
feverishly developing Research Pad, a Web
and mobile distribution platform for
scholarly journal articles. The open access
edition of Research Pad launched at
Frankfurt with a library of 250,000 arti-

cles, Martinent says, and we are adding

new journals all the time.
Research Pad allows researchers to subscribe to individual journals, set alerts
for new content in their field of interest,
create an offline library, and share content
with collaborators. The reading experience across devices is seamless, and the
use of the ePub standard to deliver articles
optimizes the content for different screen
sizes, says Martinent, who is currently
discussing white-label versions of the app
with a number of journal publishers.
One example from 2014 redefines the
right time. Round the clock, a team of
lawyers and accountants at Newgen review
content on more than 4,000 websitesor
some 1,500 new developments dailyfor
changes in legislation or jurisprudence
relevant to legal professionals. They then
write up summaries, explanations, and
annotations for a series of daily newsletters
and online products to ensure that clients
subscribers have the latest information
to inform their practice.

OKS Group
One of OKS Groups biggest developments going into 2015 is its two-monthold strategic partnership with New
Jersey-based Superior Media Solutions
(SMS). This partnership provides cus-

tomers with comprehensive technology

solutionsfrom authoring, collaborative
production workflow, digital asset management, to delivery via the full range of
media channels. For publishers struggling
with digital strategy issues, we can help
to simplify the decision-making process,
allowing them to focus on developing
quality content, CEO and chairman Vinit
Khanna says.
Then there is e2e, the groups latest
offering. A cloud-based workflow system,
it shortens the publishing cycle, enhances
author experience and involvement, and
facilitates print and electronic deliveries.
The biggest e2e advantage, says Nigel
Wyman, president of OKS Prepress
Services, is its zero reliance on conventional typesetting to generate structured
content, create pages, and incorporate
author corrections. That offers significant
cost savings for online-only titles while
also allowing for parallel product deliveries in, say, XML, HTML, PDF, and
ePub. The e2e workflow also addresses
the needs of open access publishers, where
much of the actual production work rests
with the authors. Our e2e workflow is
perfectly poised to take on the early stages
of the production activity, from authoring
through to editorial. It works tremendously well in keeping production costs

(From l.) Vinit Khanna, Nigel Wyman and Aditya Tripathi of OKS Group

20 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

Digital Solutions in India 2015

in check, which is one big challenge faced
by OA publishers.
Antipiracy services are also new. Our
staff is trained to find sellers of pirated
content, take action to ensure removal of
the illegal products, and help publishers
develop collaborative enforcement strategies with local law enforcement. We
understand that effectively monetizing
digital content requires a comprehensive
strategy, and that should include
addressing piracy issues, Khanna says.
Meanwhile, the first module of
MarkSharks, a unique flip classroom
learning system that harnesses the power
of mobile devices to teach high school
children math and science, is now available for download via Google Play. OKS
Education CEO Aditya Tripathi says, We
are now working with a select number of
schools and organizations to test its applicability in different learning situations.
What makes MarkSharks so powerful is
its use of mobile device features such as

touch, audio, video, and accelerometer to

really draw the child into the learning
process instead of having them passively
consuming the content.

Quadrum Solutions
The past year has seen Quadrum Solutions
focus on the K12 segment, with its team
busy working on conceptualizing learning
programs (including developing the pedagogy, conceptualizing the branding, and
developing the manuscript with teachers
and subject matter experts), and editing,
designing, and illustrating the pages of
student course books, supplementary
books, and teacher training materials.
Most of the programs have a digital
component in the form of CD-ROMs,
e-books, or e-learning modules, which
we also developed, says senior v-p Jatin
Mehta, who has seen a big jump in business from Africa. His team has turned
around one Pearson South Africa project
of more than 40 math and English titles

in under two months, and is busy collaborating in India with regional and
multinational publishers such as
Scholastic, Cambridge University Press,
and Madhubun Books.
There has been a constant flow of ePub
projects from the U.S. and U.K., says
Mehta, whose team provided both reflowable and fixed layout formats for Scholastic
UK. We usually work on a series of books
of around 10 titles or more, and that fits
our scale really well. But there is a slight
slowing down in the U.S. market, which
has led to a focus on emerging markets
such as Africa, where the edutainment
segment is becoming more popular.
With a new facility consisting of three
offices across two floors in central Mumbai,
Quadrum Solutions now houses about
200 people, with another 100 or more
working as consultants and freelancers,
especially for authoring and illustrating
tasks. It is a very creative facility with
Think Bar (where teams brainstorm

EDITORIAL

www.quicksortindia.com

EC
ON
OM
IC A
L

Integrated workflow

CREATIVE
DESIGN

IFT
SW

DIGITIZATION

QUICK
FLOW
EFFICIENT

Cloud-based environment
User friendly editing processes

ABSTRACTING
&
INDEXING

IMAGE
PROCESSING

Platform & browser independent access

Email notifications to all stakeholders

PRE-PRESS

Better returns from less time to market

BOOKS

JOURNALS

MAGAZINES

E-PRODUCTS

E-LEARNING

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

21

Digital Solutions in India 2015

(From l.) Trishita Vora, Kunjli Majmudar and Jatin Mehta of Quadrum Solutions

and ideate), Writers Hub (for inspiration), and even a Green Wall (on ecofriendly office practices such as recycling
and saving energy). We also organize
social events such as teacher panels and
workshops where teachersand, sometimes, publisherskeep our team updated
on trends, researches, new content creation requirements and developments,
classroom demands, and new teaching
methodologies in the education space,
says Mehta, who is busy encouraging
more of his consultants to keep up with
industry demands for specialized content
through the Virtual Quadrum platform.
Keeping tab of the latest in the industry,
staying ahead with a lot of R&D,
and delivering quality products
and services every time are the key
to longevity in this business.

third-tier city, which is located some 540

kilometers southwest of Chennai.
About half of Quick Sorts business
covering verticals such as publishing,
finance, and health carecomes from
the U.K. and continental Europe, with
another 36% from the U.S. On the publishing side, the book-journal split is
about 45% to 55%. The companys expansion and growth has been fast considering that it remains very much under
the radar and works mostly through client
referrals. Kumar attributes the success
to the right work attitude, a strong
emphasis on innovation, and great business idea application.

Quick Sort India

Chennai-based one-stop BPO
provider Quick Sort India ventured into e-publishing domain
starting with typesetting in 2004
and STM journal services five
years later. We now have 250
employees with two delivery centers, Chennai and Ooty, chairman
and managing director Venkatesh
Kumar says, adding that the Ooty
expansion is for a social cause to
help the development of the
22 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

The innovation part has seen the team

developing some 60 plug-ins to automate
production processes. Its proprietary
online authoring system, for example,
has a proven track record of improving
manuscript quality by 40%. This is made
possible by the systems intelligent pattern recognition capabilities, which
identifies specific client styles and alerts
the editor to ensure style continuity. So,
the editing becomes simple and qualitydriven. Then we have Quickflow, a
proprietary component-based HTML5
workflow that is compatible with all
types of specifications, easily customized,
and works based on a generic DTD. Such
automation reduces the training cost
for the company, and enables delivery of
cost-effective and high-quality solutions
to clients, company president A.R.
Nallathambi says.
A collaborative single-source end-toend publishing platform has also been
developed to ensure a transparent workflow between Quick Sort and its clients.
The interface, which is easily adaptable
and customizable to fit different publication styles and templates, allows the
stakeholders to work in a sequential,
foolproof, and automated process,
Kumar says of the cloud-based platform.
These are all about speed, accuracy,
and accountability. Improving accessibility and streamlining processes provide a win-win situation for both Quick
Sort and its clients. You can say that we
are small in numbers but
big on ideas and vision.
More automation and validation tools to further
reduce turnaround time
and increase efficiencies are
in the works. He says that
in 2015 the company is
exploring new markets and
offering additional publishing services.

A.R. Nallathambi (l.)

and Venkatesh Kumar
of Quick Sort India

tnq.co.in

All on the same web page

A single URL unites authors, typesetters and publishers in Proof Central, a TNQ platform that has transformed
the proofing process for over 1400 STM journals from PDF to HTML, with the XML intact. TNQ makes it possible
for editors, reviewers, authors, all of publishing, to collaborate along similar lines. To get on the same page with
TNQ, contact info@tnq.co.in.

Digital Solutions in India 2015

SourceHOV and Rule 14

Working with legal publishers for the

past 15 years has provided SourceHOV
with incredible insights into the market
segment. One of the biggest challenges
for publishers is producing the headnote
a summary of what might be quite a
lengthy court judgmentto an exacting
brief more quickly and cheaply in the face
of rising volumes of court documents,
says business development director Gary
Rodrigues, whose company has invested
in state-of-the-art machine-learning tools
that significantly reduce the time taken
to create a headnote.
Thats where sister company Rule 14
comes into play. The artificial intelligence engine that powers Rule 14 is able
to continuously monitor large data feeds,
applying pattern detection to time-intensive classification tasks such as data relevance, topic identification, and sentiment
analysis. In headnote creation, our goal
is to minimize the level of human involvement. By extracting all the key elements
automatically from the judgment, and
then having an editor focus on writing
the headnote from the salient information,
there is an efficiency gain of over 50%
and sometimes up to 80%, Rodrigues
says, recalling one particular project where
Rule 14 monitored several websites for
the latest court judgments, and then sent
summarized results based on specific client
brief to the publisherall within 60
minutes of publication.
In the financial services sector, Rule
14 has been used to access multiple Web
sources to monitor and track specified
data points, including officers of the company, general lines of business, company
history, and acquisition and merger information. It can also be configured to identify new records or updates to existing
records, and then return the results via
an automatically generated human-readable output format such as Excel. Every
engagement is different. SourceHOV
works closely with the publisher to identify the requirements, and sets about
calibrating the rules within Rule 14,
Rodrigues says. Through a series of iterative phases, the engine gets more refined
and gradually begins to learn.

Gary Rodrigues, business development

director at SourceHOV

Rule 14 has been used extensively

within SourceHOVs production environment to scale its operational capabilities
without the need to increase head count
or turnaround time. As a BPO organization, it is in our DNA to continuously
improve our processes and deliver value
to our customers, and, as we understand
our publishers content better, we are
becoming more involved in their product
evolution and development, Rodrigues
says.

Swift Prosys
Being small (and nimble) has worked

tremendously well for Swift Prosys, with

managing director and founder Mohan
Thas Shanmugam busy targeting clients
and markets that are often overlooked
(and underserved) by the bigger solutions providers. We have established a
roster of clients in very diverse markets
such as Canada, South Africa, Australia,
Scandinavia, and soon, hopefully, the
Middle East.
But communicating the technical parts
of the digitization process can be a
daunting task when there are language
barriers. With that in mind, one of his
project managers took the initiative to
learn French for a year to better supervise
projects from France and Canada, and to
promote Swift Prosys at the Paris and
Quebec book fairs. One French media
company now puts through about 50,000
pages a month for online e-paper production, for which the turnaround time can
range from one to 48 hours depending
on complexity, says Shanmugam, whose
team has rich experience in this segment,
having processed and archived millions
of newspaper and magazine pages in the
past couple of years.
A recent archival project, for instance,
saw the team converting trade directories
dating back to 1910 for a Scandinavian
client. The 120,000 pages were OCR-ed,
cleaned, corrected, and converted into
XML using RegEx. The final delivery
was in ePub2, which was processed

Mohan Thas Shanmugam, managing director of Swift Prosys

24 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

Digital Solutions in India 2015

automatically from the XML files. We
also had many HTML5 projects in the
past year, and that has prompted us to
develop a training program on these
markup languages, as well as on animation
and gaming, where we are seeing more
inquiries from different markets.
For Shanmugan, the lack of resources
to establish sales offices in every market
that he serves is a good thing as he
embarks on a series of partnerships with
local companies. We have partnered with
a consulting firm in Italy, for instance, to
service government institutions, universities, and libraries in Europe, and with
one company in Senegal to further promote our digitization services in West
Africa. It works very well because I can
rely on my partners who have the local
knowledge and network to do their part
in marketing and aftersales servicing while
my team focuses on the production and
technical processes.

Thomson Digital

Plans are already in full swing for a new

production facility in Morocco, where
64% of the countrys 33 million people
are below the age of 34. More than 20
million of the population are French
speakers and the penetration of English
among the young is very high. These
translate into a huge pool of resources
for handling content in French, English,
and Arabic, executive director Vinay
Singh says, adding that the Casablanca
facility, which is dedicated to LaTeX/
TeX processing for books and journals
in French and English, will be functional
by the end of the year.
The need to keep pace with the dynamic
changes in the education industry, especially in the U.S., has also prompted
Singh to set up shop in New York. TDI
Digital Solutions offers onshore services
that focus on rich media, animation, and
gaming, and cater exclusively to the
requirements of the North American

Vinay Singh, executive director at Thomson

Digital

publishing market. This office and the

Casablanca facility are the results of a
yearlong strategic action plan, which

Digital Solutions in India 2015

serves to expand our business horizon and
strengthen our market presence in selected
territories.
In the meantime, TD-XPS, its flagship
Web-based digital publishing platform,
has been expanded to include real-time
proofing, a Web-based submission system,
and a platform-independent autopagination system. We have added new functionalities such as semantic tagging of
content, Big Data analytics support, and
APIs for various databases, including
CrossRef and PubMed, Singh says.
TD-XPS users can build LMS modules
from scratch or use its smart apps to
facilitate one-click publishing on handheld devices. This platform will continue
to grow to support key business requirements for our clients.
Understanding and anticipating future
market requirements is the key, Singh
adds: Our R&D strategy is based on
investment in technology to offer solutions, not just services. We emphasize on
efficiency through automation in all
aspects of work at our production facilities
to provide high-quality, cost-effective
content management solutions aimed at
reducing the turnaround time. In the long
term, the goal is to capitalize on our core
competencies to provide software solution
services to the publishing industry.

TNQ

Proof Central, TNQs proofing platform,

currently supports more than 1,400 STM
journals, serving large publishers with
hundreds of titles as well as societies that
run only a handful. That Proof Central
has utility at either end of the spectrum
is an additional indicator of its universal
relevance. It is a mature product with
a healthy backlog and ample room for
evolution. It is also set up for math
editing in WYSIWYG and TeX. It supports more languages in the Roman script
and is proving to be of great value for
proofing books and reference works,
CEO Yakov Chandy says.
TNQ is attempting to make the review
process content-centric instead of actorcentric with Review Central. Instead of
files (PDF/DOC) to send, Review Central
creates a single URL that everyone visits
and works on. The platform reduces
reviewer fatigue and provides a fair way
to peer review, capturing an essentially
complex process with clarity and transparency for calibrated publishing,
Chandy says.
The coming months will see TNQ
unveil its authoring platform, Author
Caf, which will later be combined with
a service delivery system to enable the
team to work with the research com-

munity. Author Caf represents the

companys decisive push in taking the
entire publishing process into the online
space.
In an important first for TNQ, the
company recently transitioned 80,000
pages of pure TeX composition, providing full text XML with MathML to
one of the most prestigious societies in
North America.
TNQ owes much of its ability to handle
big projects with unique requirements
to a training program that makes more
than 1,000 graduates production-ready
every year. Its dedicated training facility,
with 27 full-time trainers, primarily
recruits and trains copy editors, but it
also conducts sessions for pagination,
graphics processing, data conversion, and
proofreading skills. Such rigorous recruitment, induction and training processes
have in fact made TNQ the de facto
training ground for STM.
Business aside, TNQ is known for many
CSR initiatives, especially the annual
lecture series that it co-sponsors with
Cell Press. Eric Lander, the key architect
of the Human Genome Project, was the
featured speaker at the recent series,
which was attended by more than 4,000
students and researchers.

(From l.) Shanthi Krishnamoorthy, M.V. Bhaskar, Kalpana Chandrasekar, Yakov Chandy and S.K. Venkatesan of TNQ
26 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y A P R I L 2 7 , 2 0 1 5

KiwiTech_Full_page_design_07042015_V2.pdf 1 4/7/2015 4:02:40 PM

TECHNOLOGY
Cloud
Gaming
Databases
Full-stack

STRATEGY
Mobility
Analytics
Big Data
Prototypes

Web

360O

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
SOLUTIONS

Wearables

Mobile

X)

erience Design (U
p
x
I/U
rE
e
s
U

CM

MY

CY

CMY

CONTENT

PROCESS

CMS
Digital Distribution
Content Processing
Graphics & Animation

ERP
CRM
Integration
Automation

Invested in 20+ innovative startups

Designed, developed & deployed over 850 projects
230+ full-stack digital technology team
End-to-end enterprise-class solutions across industries
Business and technology leadership support for startups
Washington DC | New York | San Francisco | New Delhi

partnerships@kiwitech.com

We help clients create,

manage & deliver content &
help their customer's find it.
Prepress I Postpress I Web I Digital I Mobile I Discoverability

U.S.

INDIA

Newgen North America

2714, Bee Cave Road,
Suite 201,
Austin, TX 78746

Newgen KnowledgeWorks (P) Ltd

60/3 Lattice Bridge Road
Thiruvanmiyur
Chennai. 600041, India
Phone +91-44-43480800
Fax
+91-44-24430740

Contact us: sales@newgen.co

www.newgen.co

Phone +1-512-478-5341
Fax
+1-512-476-4756