Media SolutionsBROCHURE
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When it Comes to Your Digital Content, Experience is Everything.
On-demand video programming. Online gaming. Music downloads. Rich media
advertising or E-books. The media industry stands at the forefront of all others in
taking advantage of new applications and technologies to reduce costs, better
connect with customers and gain competitive advantage.
Why? Because the online world is, in itself, an evolved form of media. Today, digital
content has been integrated into the lives of every consumer and the daily operation of
every business. This is precisely why every media industry player has been forced to
integrate the Web into its business strategy: Not just to stay ahead of competitors, but
to stay relevant, period. But incorporating the Web into your overall strategy is just the
beginning. To keep consumers engaged, you need to ensure an exceptional quality of
experience. This requires staying ahead of the technology curve; leveraging the newest
applications to create new and rewarding experiences; and using the latest cloud
technologies to ensure infrastructure is there when you need it.
CenturyLink Business knows the media industry and we understand the value placed
on creating experiences that keep digital content consumers coming back for more.
We have designed every component of our Consumer Brand Solutions portfolio to
help connect your content — no matter what form it takes — to your online audience.
CenturyLink understands the connection between media content and user
experience. Consumer Brand Solutions offers everything from infrastructure as
a service — including enterprise grade cloud offerings, application management,
development and integration to design and usability.
The products and services that make up Consumer Brand Solutions — as well as
the disciplines our support teams provide — equate to a more predictive mode of
operations for your business. This in turn contains costs and mitigates risk. Most
importantly, our enhanced monitoring and reporting plays a key role in delivering
exceptional user experiences to your audience.
Today, some of the largest media outlets in the world rely on CenturyLink to deliver
solutions that help them close the gap between their content and their audience.
We ensure video storage and streaming; host hundreds of media publications; and
deliver music to the ears of your listeners. It goes well beyond IT infrastructure to
delivering the expertise where you need it to maximize the quality of your customers’
online media experiences.
Media Solutions
Deliver more digital content... deliver a rewarding online experience
Quality of Experience
When it comes to digital content, media outlets live or die by their
customers’ online experience. After all, if a video download takes
too long to load, a better experience is just a mouse click away on a
competitor’s site. The End-User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) and
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) services provide your
business with unprecedented insight into the performance of the
applications that support your media assets. We can provide a robust
view of your entire Web ecosystem from the transactions occurring
within your servers right up to your end-users’ desktops. And because
we’ve wrapped our monitoring tools into an intuitive management
fabric, you can effortlessly access and control this information. For
additional protection, if performance dips below acceptable thresholds,
our Web Solutions Center team is alerted and proactively troubleshoots
problems. And we offer performance-level service level agreements
(SLAs) based upon your end-users’ quality of experience to give you
peace of mind that your brand is truly in safe hands.
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Just-In-Time Infrastructure
Media outlets that fail to prepare for traffic spikes associated
with large media events or publications on their Web properties
are taking significant risks. Online media consumers are a fickle
bunch and don’t have patience to suffer through mediocre site
performance. Even expected seasonal shifts in demand can
overstress your site. Although overbuilding will certainly ensure
infrastructure is always available, the cost of adding reserve
capacity is steep. And because much of that capacity goes
unused much of the time, it’s an inefficient way to ensure a
positive user experience.
CenturyLink Cloud Database services provide an elegant and
cost-effective solution by eliminating the need to overbuild
physical servers. By leveraging our cutting-edge virtualization
technologies, you can dramatically reduce your server footprint
and cost of your Web environment. Most importantly, you can
ensure that capacity is always available to accommodate your
dynamic site loads. To help you reap the most benefits from our
Cloud Database services, our Cloud Acceleration Consulting
Services can help your business migrate from a traditional server
to a cloud environment, and ensure that your applications and
digital content are optimized for cloud performance.
Lifecycle Management
Online media management is complex. Whether it’s updating
published articles or video content, your websites and the digital
content within them are typically delivered through highly matrixed
teams of internal marketing and IT staffs, and frequently third-
party agencies as well. This organizational complexity increases
the probability of missteps or miscommunications that can impact
your ability to launch timely content. Worse, it can result in broken
code that will destroy the user experience of your audience.
CenturyLink ensures that your content launches smoothly by
streamlining the complex workflow involved in bringing either
products or digital media to market. Our Web Lifecycle services
include Site Launch, Release and Change and Capacity Management.
We put the proper controls in place to provide your business with a
smooth and predictable operating model that significantly increases
your speed to market. Lifecycle Management also enables rapid
corrective “roll back” should you need to quickly pull content offline.
Marketing Effectiveness
Marketing executives and brand managers have always been
frustrated by the difficulty of understanding the effectiveness of
how their online content connects with consumers. The
capability to track site traffic so that you know what your
customers are doing when they visit your site is critical when
it comes to fine tuning your Web properties to deliver an
exceptional experience. Knowing which pages within your sites
are experiencing the most traffic, how much of that traffic
converts to actual sales, and where drop offs are occurring are
just a few of the metrics that CenturyLink Web Analytics provide.
What’s more, by knowing who is visiting certain pages within
your site, you can attract advertisers that correspond with the
specific demographic that is accessing your media content. By
allowing your business to easily capture, track, and report on this
data, CenturyLink helps you optimize your site and maximize its
potential for driving revenue.
Social Media
Web 2.0 and social media have rapidly become the centerpiece
for how media is shared or promoted. People want to share their
media experiences, and digital media lets them do so.
To enable this, however, media companies will have to provide
social tools and experiences. They’ll also have to accept that
consumers will generate their own. In many cases, the unofficial
social community that develops around media content will
be much larger than the “official” experience that the media
company initiates. We can provide the architecture for building
forums, blogs or wikis, all of which are easily administered
through the SavvisStation customer portal. And we can drive
page views by helping you market your content through a broad-
reaching social network.
Brand Protection
Security is a challenge for even the most technically
sophisticated enterprises. A security breach on your website
could result in negative publicity in newspapers, blogs and
online forums that could significantly damage your reputation
and brand image. Attracting and retaining a security staff with
up-to-date skills, identifying where your organization’s systems
and processes are the most vulnerable and complying with the
ever-increasing burden of industry standards are just some of the
security challenges facing businesses today.
When it comes to security, CenturyLink has it all. Our extensive
menu of security services means you can design a customized
and comprehensive solution that suits your particular needs,
regardless of when or how it is implemented. Most importantly,
we will serve as your trusted advisor, working with you to create
and implement a security strategy that helps you achieve your
long-term business goals, whatever those happen to be.
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Consulting Expertise
Let’s face it: unless you’re in the IT services business, you’d rather focus your staff on core business issues rather than on chasing
new technologies that might support your strategic initiatives. Yet you must still somehow monitor how emerging technologies might
help you improve your ability to connect your digital content with your end users, enhance the performance of your applications and
websites or improve the efficiency of your infrastructure. It’s a delicate balancing act. Focus too heavily on technology and your own
initiatives will suffer. Neglecting technology could leave your business playing catch up with your competitors. CenturyLink can help
you achieve the right balance. Among other strengths, we offer you:
Application Knowledge. Our teams can help you identify and implement the best
applications to support your specific business goals.
Cloud AccelerationHave you considered deploying cloud services but lacked the
time or resources to plan and execute a migration? We can help
you make sense of what is currently available and assist you in
choosing the right platform for your business. After all, not all
clouds are created equal. And when you select a cloud platform,
we can design, migrate and implement your infrastructure so the
transition is seamless for your business.
Web OptimizationOur teams will provide a thorough assessment of your test,
staging and production environments and identify gaps that are
slowing your business down. We’ll identify the problem areas
and fix them by helping you leverage new technologies and fine
tune your existing applications to optimal performance.
Web Lifecycle ServicesNo one understands the challenges faced by the media industry
better than CenturyLink. Whether you’re a game publisher, rich
media ad agency, or online print publishing house, the sites
that connect your content with the marketplace are managed
and delivered by multiple marketing and IT teams within your
business and — most likely — third-party agencies to help drive
development of digital content. Multiply that by the number of
new releases and updates to existing media assets that your
business is running simultaneously, and the processes and
procedures become exponentially more complex. Our teams will
untangle these complexities while quickly establishing processes
that span multiple organizations, ensure smooth communications
and provide you with the tools and resources you need to launch
and manage your campaigns more efficiently.
Brand Reusability
No one wants to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Yet one of the
biggest problems that organizations with multiple brands and
business units face is how to cost-effectively reuse information
assets. Whether those assets are in the form of infrastructure
components, applications or digital content, most organizations
don’t leverage them appropriately. CenturyLink helps large
enterprises with multiple business units significantly lower
their IT spending by identifying and utilizing existing IT services
across their organizations. In the end, you’ll write fewer checks
for new hardware and application licenses — and your business
operations will run more smoothly and cost effectively.
Quality of Experience• Measure application performance from 80,000
locations around the world
• Provide visibility into page load times
from a customer’s viewpoint
• Identify and correct application issues before
they occur
Just-in-Time Infrastructure• Stop overbuilding capacity
• Cut costs
• Reduce server sprawl
• Access capacity when you need it
• Automatically provision operating system
instances through the SavvisStation
Customer Portal
Lifecycle Management• Simplify launch processes
• Expedite change management
• Improve communications between
internal and third-party teams
Marketing Effectiveness• Understand what pages on your site
are successful
• Fine tune your campaigns based on
customer traffic and revenue conversion
• Segment visitors
• Gather data across several websites or
analyze each one individually
Why Consumer Brand Solutions?
Global Headquarters Monroe, LA (800) 728-8471
EMEA Headquarters United Kingdom +44 (0)118 322 6000
Asia Pacific Headquarters Singapore +65 6591 8824
Canada Headquarters Toronto, ON 1-877-387-3764
About CenturyLink Business
CenturyLink, Inc. is the third largest telecommunications company in the United States. Headquartered in Monroe, LA, CenturyLink
is an S&P 500 company and is included among the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest corporations. CenturyLink Business delivers
innovative private and public networking and managed services for global businesses on virtual, dedicated and colocation platforms. It
is a global leader in data and voice networks, cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprise business customers.
For more information visit www.centurylink.com/enterprise.
©2015 CenturyLink. All Rights Reserved. The CenturyLink mark, pathways logo and certain CenturyLink product names are the property of CenturyLink. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Services not available everywhere. Business customers only. CenturyLink may change or cancel services or substitute similar services at its sole discretion without notice.145010114 - BR150559
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For more information about CenturyLink Business, visit www.centurylink.com/enterprise.