Digital media partnership: MongoDB and Arc XP redefine storytelling – Business

As MongoDB Inc. charts its course toward a $2 billion revenue milestone and a staggering $28 billion market cap, its journey intertwines with that of Arc XP, a division of The Washington Post.

The Post is poised at the vanguard of digital media and high-volume storytelling solutions.

“We have our suite of applications for very specific workflows, but everything speaks to each other’s, [it’s] completely integrated,” said Joey Marburger (pictured, right), director of product strategy and design at Arc XP. “When we’re working with customers and developing products internally, we don’t have to stop … we can start working on it seamlessly.”

Marburger was joined by Joe Croney (left), vice president of technology and product development at The Washington Post, as they spoke with theCUBE Research’s chief analyst Dave Vellante at the MongoDB.local NYC event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the MongoDB and its relation to Arc XP, the changing landscape of digital media and how artificial intelligence is reshaping online content creation. (* Disclosure below.)

Joe Croney, of The Washington Post, and Joey Marburger, of Arc XP, talk to theCUBE about the evolution of digital media.

Arc XP: From internal tool to media solution powerhouse

Originating as an in-house solution for The Washington Post, Arc XP matured into a competitive player in the content management system arena. But in a sea teeming with such systems, how did Arc XP navigate the choppy waters of competition? The answer lay in its origin story — a tale of solving common editorial woes that resonated with publishers worldwide.

“Part of the story for us is a focus on developer experience,” Croney said. “It’s one of the reasons that my team loves using MongoDB, is all the services MongoDB has for developers. The same is true for Arc XP. We have a robust set of SaaS tools for developers to access through our APIs and really embed workflows around high volume content creation for their editorial teams.”

Arc XP’s trajectory mirrored MongoDB’s growth narrative. Just as MongoDB thrived in the operational database sphere, Arc XP’s horizontal platform catered to diverse media workflows, aligning seamlessly with the shifting sands of digital publishing, according to Croney. MongoDB Atlas emerged as a linchpin, ensuring high availability and scalability for Arc XP’s cloud-native tech stack.

“We definitely are more of a horizontal platform,” Croney said. “Similar to Mongo’s story of growth, that’s been the story of Arc XP, where we’ve seen demand not only in print traditional publishers, but also in broadcast, in commercial venues, looking to have a presence on the digital space.”

The promise of AI in digital media

The allure of AI also beckoned, promising to revolutionize content creation and curation. Arc XP’s foray into AI heralded a new dawn, with bespoke AI editors and assistants augmenting the editorial process. Yet, amid the excitement, the specter of model variability loomed large. The quest for the perfect model was akin to chasing shadows, with proprietary and open-source models vying for supremacy.

“For each individual feature within our AI products, you can select different models for different features,” Marburger said. “We are doing our own comparisons of running kind of a battery of tests for the features against all the models to determine weights and biases, speed, accuracy, hallucination; and then have preferred models that then we recommend, but then we allow customers to verify for themselves.”

But AI’s ascent also brings forth ethical quandaries, chief among them being the proliferation of deepfakes. As AI tools grow more sophisticated, so does the need for robust authentication mechanisms. Arc XP’s commitment to data privacy and authenticity manifested in its AI platform, equipped with detection mechanisms to combat the menace of deepfakes.

“The authenticity of the content is very important to our customers as is data privacy concerns for in process content, as well as published content,” Croney said. “One of the reasons we’ve created this flexible architecture, where you can choose your models, is partially the open source or which one is best for the challenge at hand. But it’s also the business concerns about where is the data at rest.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the MongoDB.local NYC event:

(*MongoDB.local NYC event. Neither MongoDB Inc., .)