Digital Technology has signed major Chicago publisher Sun-Times Media in the latest of a string of US orders for its cloud-based circulation and audience engagement product.

The company says the large-scale deployment is a major expansion of its cloud-based solutions at the publisher. The Wrapports company serves more than 300 communities across the greater Chicago region with media properties including the flagship ‘Chicago Sun-Times’.

Recent weeks have seen Cheyenne Newspapers opt for circulation and advertising products at the ‘Wyoming Tribune-Eagle’ and the ‘Laramie Boomerang’, and Robinson Media’s Texas-based ‘Waco Tribune-Herald’ take circulation, advertising and financial software, all via DTI’s Cloud platform.

Sun-Times Media already uses DTI’s cloud editorial solution, and wanted unified circulation for their end-to-end operations.

Technology vice president Jeff Kane says they wanted to avoid costs associated with an on-premises system, such as resources and infrastructure. “And, we wanted a mechanism to keep pace with where the technology is going,” he says.

The ContentPublisher deployment will be the largest via DTI Cloud. With growing digital and print publications and apps in the works, a current environment which includes multiple publications with legacy circulation apps on multiple platforms, has made it difficult from a reporting and product packaging standpoint, he says.

Kane also says PCI compliance –safeguarding of customers’ payment card data – was an imperative, with the company working with DTI as a development partner.

At Cheyenne, the solutions help meet strategic, budgetary, and productivity goals. Larry Catalano, controller of the daily ‘Wyoming Tribune-Eagle’, says that with a constant flow of new software releases, the publisher wanted to keep pace with the latest versions. “We also needed to streamline our operations and eliminate the costs of maintaining our own servers,” he says. “New features, flexibility, and the operational efficiencies were big motivators for us.”

For long-time DTI customer Robinson Media, moving their enterprise applications to a cloud computing model is a strategic decision: “The cloud approach is by far the logical direction for our business,” says editor and publisher Donnis Baggett.

The audience relationship management solution will provide live business analytics for measuring and managing subscription growth, while the total solution delivers everything needed for cross-media ad sales, production, and billing.