MuleSource announced that Scripps Networks selected Mule as a core element in its SOA infrastructure for media asset management.

Scripps Networks – the dominant media and marketing company in the home, food and lifestyle categories – is comprised of HGTV, Food Network, DIY Network, Fine Living Network (FLN) and Great American Country (GAC). Scripps develops content for television and the Internet, in which on-air programming is complemented with an array of broadband video, social media areas and e-commerce components on companion Web sites that attract more than 18 million unique visitors each month.

To manage this complex network of media content, Scripps created an SOA infrastructure based on Mule that incorporates and orchestrates services that perform critical business functions such as ingesting media, registering and indexing assets, retrieving stored assets and program scheduling. The new media asset management system also efficiently manages error handling for constantly changing business requirements, taking advantage of Mule’s lightweight and flexible architecture.

“Mule is clearly the critical component of our overall business architecture at Scripps Networks,” said Kamlesh Sharma, a Scripps Networks software engineer who helped design the new SOA infrastructure. “With Mule, we possess the flexibility and agility to meet the business needs while simultaneously being able to robustly handle any system errors that come our way.”

With Mule as the foundation for its SOA infrastructure for media asset management, Scripps Networks can now better handle the increasing proliferation of content sources, media formats, and delivery channels, where the same program might air on the standard definition HGTV channel as well as the high definition HGTV-HD before being streamed to the Web site. By exposing application functionality as services and assembling them in a loosely coupled way, Scripps Networks’ infrastructure can accommodate frequent business process changes while minimizing development and maintenance costs.

“Mule allows customers like Scripps Networks to build a modular and flexible SOA infrastructure even where the business logic might reside in legacy systems and third-party applications,” said Ross Mason, CTO and co-founder of MuleSource. “Our open and lightweight architecture coupled with MuleSource’s powerful enterprise-class monitoring and management tools allow customers to scale easily without the high cost and vendor lock-in of proprietary products.”