WideOrbit

Established in 1999, San Francisco based WideOrbit is a global leader in premium broadcast technology. Its single-vendor platform helps media companies manage ad operations across business processes and media types. Its flagship WO Traffic software is used by more than 3,000 television and radio stations, as well as major media networks like Bell Media, DirecTV, Fox Sports, NBC Universal, Viacom and more. Another 3,200+ radio stations operate on WideOrbit’s automation platform.

"In 2000 we created our first product in Delphi, WO Traffic, with eight developers and Microsoft SQL Server. Today we have 60 developers working on Delphi."

-William Offeman, Executive VP of Engineering

Challenge

Given the fast-changing nature of the media industry, WideOrbit constantly faces prolific development requirements. The company invests more than $35 million annually in product development and support.

WideOrbit is moving aggressively to develop solutions that help media companies monetize audiences regardless of the device a consumer uses to access their content. “Everything we develop is about maximizing broadcaster revenues and driving the business of advertising,” says Anders Ohlsson, Technical Product Manager, WO Traffic for Radio & Digital. “Our products support every step of the broadcast business sales cycle, from creating proposals to ingesting content to distributing it to the public. Our platform offers everything media companies need to run advertising operations from end to end.”

In the past two years, WideOrbit grew from 350 to 550 employees, and plans to continue hiring at a rapid clip. The expansion of its developer group working with Delphi is a huge part of that growth. Manager, WO Traffic for Radio & Digital. “Our products support every step of the broadcast business sales cycle, from creating proposals to ingesting content to distributing it to the public. Our platform offers everything media companies need to run advertising operations from end to end.”

Solutions

WideOrbit has worked with Delphi since its founding. Delphi is a complete software development solution from Embarcadero for rapidly designing, coding, and extending connected apps across Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, and IoT. “Almost all of our software is written in Delphi, starting from the days when we focused only on television,” Ohlsson says. “We also now use it for our radio, digital and cable network software solutions.”

 

 

The Results

WideOrbit continues to use Delphi as the foundation for strengthening its products and expanding its portfolio – even when there’s little consistency among its customers’ technology backbones. “It’s simply mind-blowing that Delphi allows our team to develop for Win32, Win64, OSX, iOS, and Android with the same compiled code, even when it’s 20 years old,” says Ohlsson. Offeman is especially excited about the new products and features his team is building with Delphi. “We are revamping existing mobile solutions and creating new ones, using FireMonkey for order entry and order approval, as well as log view. We are also working on REST (representational state transfer) style APIs for scaling web services and cross-platform support.”

With its growing customer base and product offerings, WideOrbit has more demand than ever for Delphi developers, says Cristina Gutierrez, Senior Recruiter. “If an experienced engineer is interested in multi-tier enterprise development work and building the future of the media business, we’re definitely interested in speaking with them. We have four open positions with more to come.”

Ohlsson emphasizes that working on enterprise level development platforms like Delphi brings numerous benefits to developers. “Delphi is a great foundation for building a solid career.”

"[Delphi] gives us the ability to create and maintain applications across Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android with one source code base."

-William Offeman, Executive VP of Engineering.