UK Business Intelligence Publisher Argus Media selects Vitrium’s Document Security Solution to Protect Revenue Generating Content

Argus Media, publisher of business Intelligence and data for the global energy and commodity markets, chooses Vitrium to secure valuable market reports containing price assessments, market commentary and news, and business intelligence reports that analyze market and industry trends.

Vitrium’s document security and analytics solution, Vitrium Security, has been selected to provide digital rights management (DRM) to Argus Media, a leading global provider of price assessments, business intelligence and market data for the global energy and commodities markets. Argus Media has been leveraging the document controls in Vitrium Security to prevent copyright infringement, unauthorized sharing, and illegal distribution of its subscription-based reports. “There is a vast amount of intellectual property that goes into our pricing and market reports,” says Denis Komov, Data Manager at Argus Media. Prior to implementing Vitrium Security to protect valuable intellectual property published in market and business intelligence reports, Argus Media was risking revenue from its paid subscriptions due to the illegal distribution of its PDF-based reports, particularly in countries like Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

“Since our business is based on the subscriptions we charge to clients for access to this information, it is incumbent that we protect that intellectual property,” Mr. Komov continued.

Reports were being emailed to Argus Media’s subscribers as PDF attachments without appropriate file-level security layers. This left Argus Media exposed to risks of illegal redistribution of their content to non-paying users, or worse, to entities looking to resell Argus Media’s intellectual property to earn their own revenue. With dozens of reports published daily, weekly, and monthly, the financial impact of the risk was astounding to the company.

In its quest to find a DRM solution to protect its PDF reports, the team at Argus Media came across Vitrium’s flagship document security solution, Vitrium Security. The team evaluated Vitrium Security and discovered its easy administrative interface and diverse range of security features, including the user-specific watermarks, copy and print control, computer device limits, remote revoking of access, and more. “This was the primary reason we sought out a PDF document protection solution like Vitrium Security. The system not only protects our reports and our valuable IP, but it has also helped our firm preserve its revenue streams.”

With a new DRM system in place, the Argus Media production team in Moscow now follows a simple DRM process using Vitrium Security for document security. They continue to distribute their reports via email with PDF attachments, but now those PDF reports are encrypted with additional document controls, and there is less concern of unauthorized copying, sharing or reselling. Argus Media also benefits from Vitrium Security’s analytics dashboard and activity reports, “Vitrium Security not only protects our content but we can also track user activity via the audit log, which provides very useful information for us,” concluded Mr. Komov.

About Vitrium
Vitrium provides document security solutions to empower businesses that create, publish, or distribute proprietary or confidential content. Vitrium’s enterprise document security and digital rights management (DRM) software allows clients to protect, control, and analyze exactly how their content is used by their audience. Vitrium protected documents have been published and distributed by thousands of companies and accessed by over a million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.vitrium.com.

About Argus Media
Argus is an independent media organization with more than 700 full time staff. It is headquartered in London and has offices in each of the world’s principal commodity centers. Its main activities comprise publishing market reports containing price assessments, market commentary and news, and business intelligence reports that analyze market and industry trends.

More than half of Argus employees are commodity journalists who specialize in reporting news and price information relating to physical energy and related commodity markets. They operate according to a rigorous Editorial Code of Conduct and a compliance and ethics policy that align with best journalistic practice, including the avoidance of conflicts of interest.

Argus is a leading provider of data on prices and fundamentals, news, analysis, consultancy services and conferences for the global crude, oil products, natural gas, electricity, coal, emissions, bioenergy, fertilizer, petrochemical, metals and transportation industries. Data provided by Argus are widely used for indexation of physical trade. Companies, governments and international agencies use Argus information for analysis and planning purposes.
Argus has 20 offices globally, including London, Houston, Washington, New York, Calgary, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Dubai, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney, Moscow, Astana and other key centers of the commodity industries. Argus was founded in 1970 and is a privately held UK-registered company.

For more information, visit www.argusmedia.com.