HIT Entertainment Builds on Success with Enterprise Deployment of Accellion

Accellion®, Inc., the award-winning pioneer in providing enterprise-class, secure collaboration and managed file transfer solutions, today announced HIT Entertainment, one of the world's leading independent children's entertainment producers and rights-owners, has expanded the use of Accellion Secure File Transfer with a virtual deployment of the solution.

The move to virtual deployment will create large cost savings in power and cooling, and is recognition of the effectiveness of the Accellion solution. Since it was first installed three years ago, the product has been expanded to cover the entire enterprise. This includes all of HIT Entertainment’s employees and business partners across the globe, and with 300 employees and 150 external production companies, there are a lot of people reaping the benefits of Accellion’s effectiveness when it comes to secure file transfer.

“HIT Entertainment is responsible for well-known programmes such as Bob the Builder, Thomas & Friends and Fireman Sam, and has a pressing need to protect its intellectual property when sending so many files to its offices across the world,” said James Herbert, HIT Entertainment’s Senior Manager of Global Infrastructure.

Accellion originally replaced FTP as the main method for file transfer at HIT Entertainment, a way of working that was cumbersome, not secure and led to an additional management overhead. After three years, the company was ready to commit for a longer period with Accellion. “The product is easy to run,” said Herbert, “it virtually manages itself.”

Accellion has enabled new security measures to be implemented over time. “One of the biggest concerns was security,” said Herbert. “With our old FTP system, we had to manually assign rights to partner companies and then we had to remember to remove them if they stopped working with us.”

He pointed out that the company can now also keep closer tabs on who is receiving files. Herbert said that Accellion has not only offered a more secure and more manageable option than the old FTP server, but it also provides a degree of intellectual property protection. “The control is important to us. So if we send files to someone we know that they can’t forward those files to other people.”

The move to the virtual deployment came after three years as an Accellion customer. “We were coming to the end of the support period and we looked at our options. We were reducing hardware throughout the organisation anyway so the Accellion virtual appliance was a perfect solution,” Herbert said. The move has certainly made financial sense. “We’ve saved on power and cooling costs, I estimate we’ve saved £7k a year.”

“The fact that HIT Entertainment uses Accellion throughout the entire company as well as so many external partners demonstrates that the Accellion File Transfer solution has become invaluable to the company,” said Accellion’s European Managing Director, Dr. Paul Steiner.

About HIT Entertainment

HIT Entertainment is one of the world's leading independent children's entertainment producers and rights-owners. HIT's portfolio includes properties, such as Barney™, Bob the Builder™, Thomas & Friends™, Pingu™, Fireman Sam™, Angelina Ballerina™ and Rainbow Magic™. HIT represents Chapman Entertainment’s Fifi and the Flowertots™ and Roary the Racing Car™ in North America, as well as Wallace & Gromit™, Shaun the Sheep™, Timmy Time™ and Aardman Classics from Aardman Animations. HIT also acts as representative for The Wiggles® in the UK. Launched in 1989, HIT’s lines of business span television and video production, content distribution, publishing, consumer products licensing and live events and has operations in the UK, US, Canada, Hong Kong and Japan. HIT is a part-owner of US-based preschool channel, PBS KIDS Sprout^SM. For more information, visit www.hitentertainment.com.

About Accellion

The world's leading corporations and government enterprises rely on Accellion solutions to secure their enterprise information and ensure compliance. Founded in 1999, Accellion, Inc. provides enterprise-class secure collaboration and managed file transfer solutions that provide the ease-of-use internal and external users need while giving the enterprise organization the protection it needs. Accellion is the pioneer and leading provider of secure file transfer and collaboration solutions for employees and external users that span virtual and public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with offices in North America, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit www.accellion.com or call 650-485-4300. Follow Accellion’s Blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Accellion, Accellion Secure Collaboration, Accellion Secure Workspace, and Accellion Managed File Transfer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Accellion, Inc. in the US and other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.