How to Choose the Right IT Partner for Publishing Platforms

Key factors to consider when selecting an Ideal IT partner for your Publishing Platform

The publishing industry has evolved with digitization and CRMs are the most viable to manage, access, and distribute the content. Moreover, content management systems, learning management systems, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML, and personalization engines are the other drivers of digital penetration supporting publishing operations. Implementation issues, not-working features, and data migration issues are common technical glitches obstructing everyday workflow and negatively impacting productivity. Hence, it’s crucial to collaborate with an IT partner who can quickly resolve technical issues and ensure continuity in the workflow. The ideal partner is the one who not only provides technical support but also executes in alignment with your business objectives. Hence, a great IT partner acts as a long-term collaborator invested in your growth, innovation, and operational efficiency.    

Below are the key factors that you should consider while choosing an ideal IT partner for your publishing platform.   

1. Experience and Industry Expertise

• The publishing industry is diverse, and each category of publisher has specific technical requirements based on content workflows and customer base. Choose a partner with demonstrated experience and industry-specific knowledge ensuring they understand your content workflows, and regulatory environment and can effectively resolve the frontend and backend technical issues.  
• Their domain expertise consists of handling large volumes of multi-media content, foreseeing challenges, transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-based environments, and maintaining content versioning.   
• Moreover, they bring valuable insights and best practices tailored to publishing workflows, which can significantly shorten project timelines and reduce errors. 

2. Technical Skills and Capabilities

• It’s crucial to have a strong technical foundation. Your IT partner must be well versed with technologies such as content management systems (CMS), cloud-native architectures, RESTful APIs, front-end frameworks, and backend stacks.  
• They should be proficient in implementing end-to-end solutions consisting of automation, analytics, personalization engines, and integrations with editorial tools to ensure your publishing platform remains agile, scalable, and innovative.   

3. Proven Track Record

• Reviewing your IT Partner’s work history serves as an insight into their past achievements, serving as the testimony of their reliable deliveries.   
• Find IT partners who have experience in website revamps, publishing workflows, omnichannel distribution, or subscription management.  

4. Scalability and Flexibility

• Your IT partner should deliver scalability to handle sudden publishing traffic surges during events, ideally, someone who can implement seamless cloud infrastructure integration.  
• They should be able to dynamically accommodate infrastructure and resources without compromising platform stability or performance.   
• The partner should support agile or flexible engagement models to align with varying business needs.  
• Agility in technology stacks ensures that your partner can accommodate legacy systems and support external software and API integrations.  

5. Security and Regulatory Compliance

• The IT partner should deliver top-notch security and regulatory practices across the development lifecycle backed by frequent vulnerability assessments.   
• Role-based access control must be implemented and practiced across the development pipeline to protect sensitive content and user data.  
• To prevent unauthorized access, Token-based authentication and multi-factor access protocols should be a standard practice.   
• The partner must adhere to compliance with global regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and DMCA to ensure legal and ethical standards.   

6. Strategic Alignment with Business Goals

Today most IT companies deliver great technical support but organizations that have an agile approach, are highly accessible, offer ongoing customer support post-deployment, and are aligned with strategic business objectives and vision are the most sought-after by companies today.    

As we have observed the crucial factors to consider while choosing an IT partner, let’s highlight the publishing-specific considerations that are essential for the selection process. It’s important to overview these considerations as the publishing industry consists of diverse publishing sectors, each having its content workflow, technical specifications, and customer base:  

Content Management:

Your IT partner should be well-versed in building and managing robust content management systems and support structured workflows, depending on the specific requirements of publishers.  

Workflow Automation:   

Like any other industry, publishing companies manage multiple tasks including, content management, storing large volumes of data, managing payment processes, security, and compliance, etc. Automating these tasks is crucial for improving efficiency and minimizing operation bottlenecks.  

Scalability and Cloud Integration: As publishing companies need to store large volumes of data, it’s crucial to integrate a cloud infrastructure in the backend to enable scalability.  

Security and Access Control: There are a lot of publishing companies that require multiple users to collaborate over the same document, for example in membership-based publishing, a single article may go through multiple peer reviews. In such scenarios, role-based access control is ideal for managing permissions securely.   

User Experience and Accessibility: Your audience be it researchers, scientists, students, or casual readers look up to great user experience, consisting of simple and intuitive navigation, responsive UI design, strong accessibility features, and much more.   

Conclusion   

Choosing the right IT partner is no less than a strategic move for shaping the future of your publishing business. Digitization is the cause behind rapid evolutions like rising content demands, diversified audience expectations, technical expertise for development and maintenance support, etc. An IT partner must bring more than just coding expertise, they must understand the unique complexities of publishing whether it’s managing STM journals, educational assessments, or member-driven platforms, and deliver solutions that are scalable, secure, and aligned with your long-term vision.  

About us

NEC Software Solutions India is a trusted technology partner to global publishers, academic societies, and associations. We specialise in delivering tailored digital solutions that streamline publishing operations, enhance user experiences, and support content accessibility across platforms. With deep domain expertise and more than 20 years of experience, we help publishing organizations adapt to evolving market needs and deliver greater value to their communities.  

Our approach is built on two key pillars: strong service delivery grounded in proven methodologies, a deep understanding of the STM publishing ecosystem that drives innovation and best practices.   

Find out more about our publishing services – Publishing – NEC Software Solutions – India

Email us at india.marketing@necsws.com.