Customer Case Study: Audible.com, an Amazon Company

keywords: audiobooks, metadata, workflow, RSuite CMS

The History

Audible introduced one of the first digital audio players in 1997. The following year it published a Web site from which audio files in its proprietary .aa format could be downloaded. Today, Audible is the Internet's leading provider of spoken audio, entertainment, information, and educational programming. Audible is the exclusive provider of audiobooks to all Apple's iTunes Music Stores worldwide.

The Challenge

In 2007, Audible saw an opportunity to improve sales if it could easily identify and share its products in the Internet space and provide open APIs to allow partners to easily integrate with Audible. A solid metadata foundation was the critical component to achieve these goals.

The Solution

RSuite CMS was selected to manage metadata used to create Audible's online product catalog. RSuite's metadata management and customizable user interfaces and APIs offered Audible the tools needed to effectively manage content and support workflow functionality. Audible completed a successful proof-of-concept project with RSuite CMS in which several use cases were identified. During this stage many business rules were also documented that were applicable to improving Audible's business opportunities. Audible worked with RSuite's developers to configure and deploy RSuite CMS after installation.

The Results

RSuite CMS became the framework upon which Audible crafted solutions to meet all its requirements: workflow, business rules validation, content aggregation and delivery, publisher feeds, audit trail, and product prototyping. In 6 months, Audible configured and implemented RSuite CMS to become both the database of record for its metadata content and its workflow tool that enables seamless transfer of content from publisher feeds to web site-ready files.

"RSuite has become a very critical system very fast!"
--Art Zegarek, Director of Data Architecture, Audible, Inc.