Charles Roberson is WAVE Corporation’s National Channel Manager, where he focuses on advancing the company's momentum in the digital asset management market by identifying, negotiating, and managing the key strategic relationships with its value-added reseller partners and integrators. He joined the company in August 2000 with more than six years of experience in digital pre-press channel management, most recently at Xante Corporation, where he served as Central and West Coast Channel Manager.

Operating in Central Florida since 1987, WAVE Corporation is an engineering services company that specializes in system design, information management and system support for the graphics arts industry, including printers, publishers and prepress professionals. Primarily functioning as a systems integrator, WAVE supports its customers by providing consulting, guidance and upgrade strategies to keep their systems productive. MediaBank software provides tools for content searching, browsing, archiving, reviewing, revising, tracking, OPI, and reports.

Please describe MediaBank and MBWeb for those who are not familiar with the products.

MediaBank is a digital asset management solution that enables organizations to more efficiently manage, use, and share their digital assets across the enterprise. MediaBank’s design reflects the many ways that editorial and production professionals, and their management teams, need to work, track, and report on their creation and use of digital assets.

MediaBank offers efficient tools for handling a wide range of pre-production media types, including photographs and other still images, and video, audio, text, and font files. Its powerful feature set includes functionality for searching, browsing, archiving, purging, reviewing, revising, and tracking digital assets. The software also provides file auditing capabilities and workflow enhancement processes. All of the assets managed in MediaBank can be used and reused in any print, publishing or Web production environment.

MBWeb and a native PC or Mac client provide the user interfaces available with MediaBank. Our web client is fully customizable as the API’s are published with the base MBWeb. It is an excellent way to simplify and customize the use of MediaBank for casual users who do not need the full power and features offered through the native client.

WAVE has been a successful systems integrator for years, using different technologies to build systems for its graphic arts clients. What prompted the acquisition last July of MediaBank?

WAVE Corporation had successfully implemented MediaBank many times over the past six to seven years. Our engineering team liked the open structure of MediaBank, which allowed for scripting and customization to meet customer objectives. Our customers vary in their approaches to solving the complexities of printing and publishing workflows. WAVE engineers found MediaBank to be an ideal foundation for integrating their total solutions; so when the product became available, WAVE seized the opportunity.

What were your short- and long-term goals in purchasing the product?