10 YOUR TAKE Industry Analysis
ow that the whirlwind of the NAB Show has settled, I wanted to share a few reflections on what I observed this year in FORECASTING CLOUDS This year’s NAB Show made it clear that change is here – and its name is cloud JON FINEGOLD, CMO, SIGNIANT The cloud is becoming an essential part of every video workflow
Vegas. It’s always interesting to hear the topics that bubble to the surface in the different conversations on the trade show floor. This year, three themes really stood out. First of all, the media industry is fully embracing a hybrid-cloud/multi-cloud world. This was not only prevalent in much of the messaging and press activity from hardware and software vendors around the show, but it was clear in the Signiant booth in our discussions with customers. Here are some key takeaways. MULTIPLE VENDORS ARE THE NORM No one appears to be going all-in with one single vendor any more. Even Netflix, once the poster child for Amazon Web Services, appears to be doing more with Google Cloud. We’re also seeing Signiant customers using a mix of on-premises storage and cloud storage, and more and more from multiple vendors. Cloud services are not commoditised. The big vendors are working hard to differentiate themselves and continue to add new services in an attempt to one-up each other. The cloud wars are on! Cloud vendors are taking media seriously. There have been many key industry hires, new media specific services conglomerates. These are all indicators that our industry is front and centre on the radar of the big cloud vendors. While these are all positive trends for the industry in terms of the pace of innovation and flexibility of options, they are adding more, not less, complexity for technical staff. This turns out to be great rolled out and vendors negotiating long-term deals with large media
that surround this affect everyone in the media supply chain. It not only has direct costs that may
news for companies like Signiant, as our products work with all types of storage and are seen as an abstraction layer for removing the complexity of dealing with multiple storage types. SAAS REPLACES CUSTOM SOFTWARE The industry is transitioning away from custom software to multi-tenant SaaS. If you were fortunate enough to be at NAB’s Devoncroft Executive Summit, you got to hear a unique view of the economics of the media technology industry from Joshua Stinehour, principal analyst at Devoncroft Partners and former industry investment banker. If his presentation appears online, I highly recommend it, and certainly this event will be on my calendar again next year. In his presentation, Stinehour talked about the challenges for vendors in committing to every special request from their customers. He showed mathematically, using MAM vendors as an example, that most vendors max out at around six customers as a result. This isn’t just a challenge for vendors, the economics
be orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be, it inhibits business agility. As media companies look to compete with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime, many are starting to realise there’s a different approach, asking themselves if it’s time to sacrifice a handful of features that their tech and ops teams ‘need’ for the reward of agility and massive cost savings. We certainly see this shift in thinking in our business, and this was illustrated on the NAB floor with many discussions around cloud ingest portals. Many of our customers are moving away from expensive, highly customised solutions for collecting finished assets from content producers around the world, in favour of Media Shuttle. Shuttle has most of the functionality of custom cloud ingest portals, but is available as an off-the-shelf, multi-tenant SaaS solution. At Signiant, we are, of course, proponents of SaaS, but our
BIG VENDORS ARE WORKING HARD TO DIFFERENTIATE THEMSELVES. CLOUDWARS ARE ON!
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