Desktop Systems

Picture Network International

Bob Griffin
President and CEO

Picture Network International (PNI) has built a thriving business by pioneering the use of the Internet to deliver a full range of images and image management hosting services. As the basis for all its online services, PNI chose servers from Sun Microsystems, Inc. from the outset confident that they would provide the performance and dependability demanded by customers. Sun and its workgroup servers proved worthy of that confidence not only then, but also today after four years of exponential growth.

By exploiting the scalability in Sun's architecture, PNI continues to provide superb levels of service to many of the world's premier users of imagery both photography and motion. Now, in a new business thrust, PNI is offering its image management software to other firms. Customers overwhelming preference for Sun as a platform led to a joint project with Sun Professional Services to develop the company's third-generation MediaQuest product for the Solaris™ operating environment.

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Pioneering the Internet hosting service concept

PNI was founded in 1993 to provide photographs to document authors using electronic distribution. "The traditional way that people acquired pictures was to look through catalogs, call the company, negotiate a price, and wait for film to be delivered," said Bob Griffin, president and chief executive officer. "We built our business to capitalize on the Internet to deliver those pictures digitally, reducing the process from days to minutes."

The company's PictureQuest library now contains over 400,000 publicly available digital images, and is the trusted source of high quality photographic materials for organizations such as advertising agencies, designers, schools, and government institutions, as well as individuals. A companion service called Media Hosting Service offers electronic lookup and distribution of private image stores to many household name television channels, movie studios, and other companies.

Initially PNI provided its images over the Internet using essentially a bulletin board service, but very soon management saw the potential benefits of hosting its service on the world wide web. In 1995, PNI implemented sophisticated web-based image management software that lets customers access online photo libraries for needed pictures. "We became among the first to offer a true hosting service for our customers," said Griffin. This image management software, accompanied by a patented natural language search engine, grew to become the basis for today's PictureQuest and Media Hosting Service. Customers can now perform the entire transaction online lookup, licensing, and taking delivery.

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Sun - the obvious choice for performance, availability, and scalability

Sun was the obvious choice to fulfill PNI's development and production needs. "Customers who access a site like ours have little patience for slow response and even less tolerance for outright failures. Sun has a well-deserved reputation for excellent performance and high availability," said Griffin. "Furthermore, we could see the explosion coming in using the Internet for hosting and transacting generally. Therefore we had to be able to count on continued high performance and reliability even after orders of magnitude growth in demand. That's what scalability is all about, and that's where Sun is unequaled."

PNI employs modern Sun workgroup servers for its two production sites. Taking advantage of the range of server models available from Sun, they selected Sun Enterprise™ 450 workgroup servers for PictureQuest, which sees about 70% of the traffic, and Sun Enterprise 250 workgroup servers for the less frequently accessed Media Hosting Services site. The two sites are architected identically: one server performs file and web service, while the second hosts an Oracle database. Internal disk storage on each database server holds up to 162 GB of image data. The online viewer bases license and delivery decisions on medium-resolution, watermarked images, and then receives over the web high-resolution, fully usable images retrieved from an online tape library powered by another Sun server.

A collection of Sun workstations and servers, including another Sun Enterprise 250 workgroup server, comprise PNI's development environment. "Sun is great for development and system management," said Tim Boan, vice president of operations. "Compared with other versions of UNIX® that I've known, the Solaris operating environment is far friendlier from a human factors standpoint. It has an enormous suite of tools for system maintenance. These virtues translate into solid business benefits such as improved productivity, more rapid deployment, and reduced downtime."

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Customer demand inspires migration from NT to Sun

Now PNI has launched a third line of business. "Customers kept asking us if we could provide the same capabilities to them that we were employing internally on our websites," explained Griffin. "So we decided to provide our image management software as a product to run on other company's computer systems."

The third generation of PNI's image management software, currently concluding beta, will soon be available for purchase under the trade name MediaQuest. This software will also be employed to introduce new efficiencies and capabilities for both the PictureQuest and MediaHost websites.

"Initially we planned MediaQuest as a Windows NT product," said Griffin. "However, the demand for a Solaris version far outstripped the interest in NT. Our customers want Sun for the same reason we did - scalability. So we've engaged in a joint project with Sun Professional Services to optimize it for the Solaris operating environment." First deliveries to Sun customers are expected in the fall of 1999.

Software sales will only add to the already mushrooming business at PNI, whose Internet based services continue to grow with no end in sight. The company, now a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak Company, has tripled or better in the last year in terms of revenues, head count, and numbers of users.

"We're processing an amazing number of transactions, sometimes three million hits per week, but there has been no degradation in performance. We can do a half million image search in just over a second," concluded Griffin. "To set our customers reliability expectations properly, we offer a guarantee against downtime, and we're proud to say that never once in all the years we've offered the service has a penalty clause been invoked. Our Sun network continues to keep pace with our growth in every respect."

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