D5.1-Appendix G - Relevance of the Hulton and Getty Images software to eCHASE
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Our main development work for the Hulton Archive and Getty Images took place roughly over the years 1994 to 2000. This was a period of rapid change, technological development and business opportunity and business disaster. The fact that the systems SSL provided were effective, reliable and adaptable is, we believe, attributable to our underlying software engineering philosophy based on evolving components which are themselves based on widely used standards, both in the formal sense and in the basic engineering sense of ensuring that the various components and subsystems have consistent simple internal interfaces. In engineering terms it resulted in successful software which provided an effective harness for the acquisition and merger of heterogeneous image library systems and thus contributed to Getty Images highly successful business strategy.
Now in translating that experience into the 21st century world of the knowledge and culture economies in which eCHASE will have its place, we have to understand the value chains and the steps between each link. Major changes are taking place in valuing intellectual property and in business attitudes to software. The Getty Images software was based entirely on proprietary tools and applications albeit built on an open systems , Unix and C, base. Today public sector requirements increasingly require Open Source software and many sophisticated, generic components are available from which to build new systems. Increasingly therefore value will come, not from the software engineering base, but from the know-how in content management and business opportunity which can quickly bring appropriately designed content to purchasers via a wide range of delivery channels.
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