Digital Solutions in India 2019
18 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ AUGUST 5, 2019
have nearly 3,000 associates—in 19 cities worldwide—that
are working towards making learning smarter,” says Arora,
who has added new services in learning solutions (including
AR/VR/MR, games, and simulations), consulting services,
and platforms (such as the CyberTest assessment engine and
the Learning Planet LMS).
“We see a boom in the emerging-technology space, specifi-
cally within AR and VR, and we are doing exciting work with
customized AR/VR solutions to address client-specific busi-
ness needs,” adds Arora, whose team’s VR-based program for
mechatronics students won a prestigious Brandon Hall
Technology award last year.Newgen KnowledgeWorks
The focus on reducing production time and costs while
increasing production efficiencies has seen Newgen
KnowledgeWorks creating several major platforms and
solutions.
There is PubKit, an end-to-end journal-management system
that incorporates dynamic scheduling with content-automa-
tion tools to optimize workflows and task scheduling to meet
the needs of each individual journal. “From submission right
through to delivery, publishers adopting PubKit have a single
dashboard to view the content progress throughout the work-
flow,” v-p Srikanth Srinivasan says.
Then there is SilkEvolve, which can read legacy content
intelligently and know when human intervention is required
to validate a decision. “This intelligent ‘guided’ process dra-
matically improves the fidelity of e-book content to the print
original,” v-p Muralidharan Pattabiraman adds, explaining
that SilkEvolve embraces all ePub3 functionalities and is
capable of implementing enhancements such as audio and
video support, SVG, MathML, multiple navigation tables, and
many new CSS3 formatting properties. “When combined with
our accessibility services, SilkEvolve is perfectly placed to
combine fast and efficient legacy conversion with the bespoke
content-enrichment processes required to bring legacy content
up to the latest WCAG standards.”
As for RedShift, the focus is on transforming the author
experience within the content-production workflow. “Authors
now have the opportunity to work in their familiar Word or
LaTeX environment. RedShift gives authors ownership of the
content-production workflow like never before, while
retaining the important checks and balances publishers need
to ensure high editorial standards and rigorous cost control,”
company president Maran Elancheran adds. “By automating
the process, we have been able to incorporate machine learning
into page composition and constantly refine the templates,
thus embedding continuous improvement into the very core
of this platform.”
For Elancheran, extending Newgen’s range of services and
applying technological solutions earlier in the product life-
cycle is becoming an important focus. “Our editorial skills arealready being used to support publishers in content develop-
ment, early manuscript assessment, and author management.
Increasingly, activities such as list management, content
acquisition, rights and permissions, peer-review management,
and product design are coming to vendors like us, and many
of these services are being delivered through our hybrid
onshore/offshore solutions.”
Such hybrid solutions, Elancheran adds, “are helping new
publishing entrants and established presses to confidently
grow their lists within their tight operating budgets. Newgen
KnowledgeWorks is here to partner them in achieving their
goals.”Thomson Digital
Innovative process automation is driving Thomson Digital’s
business operations. “We have invested in a technology frame-
work based on AI, ML, NLP, Big Data, and cloud integration
that gives us a competitive edge in terms of efficiency, speed,
quality, and cost-effectiveness while also enabling us to help
global publishers to design their publishing solutions,” execu-
tive director and CEO Vinay Kumar Singh says, adding that
there is a paradigm shift in his company’s focus from service-
centric offerings to tech-
nology-centric solutions.
“So we have invested
these technology capa-
bilities by forming an
independent software-
solution vertical called
DigiScape, a hub for
designing and devel-
oping workflow and solu-
tions for publishers,”
adds Singh, whose team
has been using TD-XPS,
its flagship web-based
digital publishing plat-
form for books, for the
past five years. “TD-XPS
provides us with the con-
cept of 1P1P [one person, one project], which we then applied
and expanded to create UniTouch, our state-of-the-art set of
tools and workflow-management systems driven by AI, ML,
and NLP, and which consist of modular services.”
Each UniTouch module is designed and developed to aim
at a specific service, thereby giving the tool a dynamic and
agile set of features. The modules act as plug-and-play decou-
pled services deployed via cloud for easy integration and acces-
sibility. UniTouch, Singh adds, has helped in improving the
company’s internal efficiencies by 80%. “Our deep insight of,
and over 50 years of working with, the publishing industry
has guided us to create these sets of digital publishing and
content solutions.”Vinay Kumar Singh, executive direc-
tor and CEO of Thomson Digital