After 15 years online, ‘The Hindu’ – owned by Chennai-baased Kasturi & Sons – has moved further ahead, almost tripling its page-views with the installation of CCI Europe’s NewsGate multimedia platform. The move is triggered by growing online penetration and an emerging mobile market in India. ‘The Hindu’, which has had an online presence since 1995, is replacing a legacy online system with the multi-channel solution. CCI NewsGate, including a digital publishing engine from Escenic, will enable the innovative Chennai-based news publisher to enlarge the scope of its online offerings. "Until very recently, we had felt that it was not worthwhile investing too much money in the online space, so our offerings have been very much under the print umbrella,” says director K. Balaji. “With the implementation of NewsGate, we have established an infrastructure allowing us to efficiently meet the demands in the online market.” When a redesigned website was launched on the new platform last year, daily page views almost tripled. The Hindu has since maintained these traffic numbers with a dynamic and continuously updated website. The move to NewsGate allows a one-system platform enabling extensive collaboration between editorial staff from print and online. For The Hindu this means the ability to provide more interactivity and more quality multimedia content on its websites, a key part of the overall business strategy. "We wanted to set up an infrastructure allowing us to create quality content for online publication. This is a prerequisite if you are considering a business model where you charge for content on your website. In that respect, the implementation of NewsGate is an important strategic decision," says Balaji. CCI says its project and support organisation has been expanded to meet the specific requirements in projects, with a unit fully focused on online and mobile publishing. In addition, new methods of development and implementation inspired by the agile mindset have been adopted. The new The Hindu website was built in close collaboration between CCI consultants and The Hindu web developers, who were trained in using and customising the Escenic system in parallel with the actual development. With a small team of developers, The Hindu is currently expanding the services offered by the new website. Rollout of all digital and print products is expected to be completed before the end of April 2010. Picture courtesy CCI Europe, Jesper Sander