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NEAL ROMANEK: What are the real efficiencies in cloud, and are there cost savings or hidden expenses that people should know about?
TIM FELSTEAD: The ‘C word’ is somewhat overused. I don’t think people should have the impression that there’s only one answer – that life, the universe and everything can be solved by cloud – because that’s simply not the case. What you’ve got to do is use whatever technology is available to solve your problems, in a more flexible, agile and efficient way. Cloud is another set of technologies that enables other modes of operation. If, when you say cloud, you’re talking about remote connectivity for control systems, or private networks and private data centres – which are shifting huge amounts of real-time data – it’s easy to get wrapped up in this idea of the cloud. Then it becomes all-knowing and all-seeing, and I think it’s a point to mention, it’s not a good use of the term – it gives people the wrong impression. JOHN WILLIAMS: I don’t really like the term cloud anyway. What do you mean by cloud? Is it the bare metal in my data centre? Or is it sat in AWS? We just try and build services within our own ‘clouds’. In terms of someone walking through the door saying ‘we want to use cloud’, you start by just trying to harness and get as much of their deliverables, finding out where they want to get to in the end. Then you work back from there and see what is achievable.
CRAIG MOEHL: Everything we do is in the cloud, right? (I also hate the word!). You could say that we’ve been doing streaming in the cloud for 16-17 years. But for the same definition, we’ve got a backup wealth server in our data centre. That’s our cloud, whether it’s private, or hybrid. We don’t have clients who come to us and ask questions about cloud. They have a business problem that they want to solve, and they’re looking to us to find a technical solution. And what we do then is push back to them and say: ‘Is it really a technical solution that you want us to provide? What exactly are you trying to get out of this event?’ We try to extrapolate everything away from a technology solution to understand what the client actually wants. If you can discern their business outcomes, then you can map something that’s technically appropriate for that, because what we’re desperately trying to avoid is the whole done-in-one approach. One thing I would like to say, in terms of using the cloud, is that it has enabled us to scale up tremendously. Whereas, before cloud, if you wanted to go into, let’s say, 50 or 100 pages on Facebook or Twitter, we had to have those encoders sitting there in the MCR, taking that SDI feed and splitting it out. We now use a product called GG Reflector, where we send a single stream up to the cloud. Cloud is definitely an enabler for us. But it’s not something that we talk about with our customers much, because it’s already part of our solution. JOHN WILLIAMS: It comes back to the context earlier, in terms of emerging technology. You still require the broadcast engineer on-site to plug all the cameras, but now the need is to understand all this next level – where it’s going and how that’s configured. And you must have a greater knowledge of the full end-to-end path.
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