System integrator and service provider, Engineering has signed a strategic partnership with MeeMix, an Israel-based specialist of media personalisation and discovery solutions, making Engineering the first to introduce a hybrid media personalisation platform in Europe at a massive scale.

"This partnership allows us to distribute a system that is useful for content aggregators to basically benefit from the "long tail". It will enable our partners to better target the customers, and to create revenues and value by better leveraging their content library," Lorenzo Barbantini Scanni (left), told IT Europa.

Barbantini Scanni is the CEO of Xaltia, (a company of 100 people and €12m turnover that was integrated to Engineering two years ago) and Key Account Telecom Italia. "Engineering's telecom division, is the result of two acquisitions: one is the Italian side of Atos Origin, the other is Xaltia, which develops and serves platforms that enable content distribution. Xaltia has a very interesting model because the company fits between the mobile and landline operators and the content aggregators. Basically we give a service of fast connection into the billing and the distribution systems of the Italian operators," he explained.

"We evaluated a few companies and technologies, and found that Meemix' s technology better fits our model, so we've been working with them for quite some time now, and we intend to approach not only the mobile and web market but also the IPTV market. Basically we want to do a personalised music recommendations, personalised playlists and streaming services, so looking at building systems, which will allow content owners - that pitch for example for ringtones leaders in the mobile market - to better target their users and therefore to be able to serve the right content to their customers."

He added that in Europe, there are little recommendation music services, which is part of what this solution can enable. "So we're now approaching big content owners and we want to work with them to enable them to use our technology. We target a lot of media - web, mobile, TV, so that's good!"

"We've just started, so we'll see where that brings us, but we believe this is a unique solution and it's getting a lot of attraction here. For now, our business is focused on Italy, but Engineering is opening a number of branches in different countries, and as soon as that is done, we will of course extend this offer to the other countries," he concluded.

In line with Engineering's internationalisation process, Engineering Belgium S.A. has just been established in order to extend and consolidate the IT activities on the EU market. Rosario Amodeo has been appointed Chairman, Tommaso Amodeo Managing Director, and Dario Buttitta Board Director. Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A. holds 75% of the new company, while the remaining stake of 25% is owned by the Irish subsidiary company Engitech Limited.

www.eng.it