Platform Approach Emerges As Alternative To SaaS

Every media supply chain requires a series of processing steps that must occur for content to move through to delivery, often by distinct applications that are purpose-built for the work at hand. Media organizations typically employ a collection of such tools to address a variety of processing requirements, such as metadata inspection, QC, transcoding and so on.

Some of these tools may be cloud-enabled services — namely, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications — while others may be software applications the organization purchases, deploys and manages on its own.

Regardless of how the various software applications are procured or deployed, organizations are able to get jobs done, but at a cost: they slide into a complicated situation where they never can fully optimize the flow of content without doing a tremendous amount of development and coding on their own to make it all work.

Issues arise around metadata commonality and metadata translation between different tools, and management of an increasingly unwieldy set of infrastructure and apps evolves into an onerous task. It becomes increasingly difficult to tie all the necessary pieces together, to identify the best logic connecting them across the supply chain and then to write and maintain the code to orchestrate the flow of content and metadata. Ensuring security across different systems and supporting infrastructure likewise grows into a more significant challenge.

Many media organizations have started out on this path, implementing discrete applications to meet business and operational demands, only to find themselves with larger management and orchestration issues. To address this complexity, a different approach is needed – one that eliminates those headaches, allowing the organization to focus on building its supply chains as opposed to building the interconnections between the supply chain components. This is where a “platform” approach brings tremendous value.

With this approach, a single platform-as-a-service (PaaS) orchestrates the usage of software applications running on cloud infrastructure as and when needed to achieve the functionality required. The platform approach allows media organizations to take advantage of applications as consumption-based SaaS without massive upfront capital investment or extensive integration work. Security is managed as part of the platform offering, and the orchestration layer remains separate from the media organization’s network and cloud storage account.

The platform itself manages activation of each tool, as well as the normalization and sharing of metadata from service to service across the supply chain, and it leverages business logic to trigger activities based on the outcome of completed tasks. Beyond the necessity of connecting one application to another, PaaS orchestration and management serve another vital purpose: collection of metadata across the media supply chain.

Every software application creates metadata that allows users to determine if a job was completed, how much time it took and how much it cost to perform. Through the platform’s data collection and reporting, an organization gains greater visibility and accountability across the supply chain — the intelligence needed to select the best tools for each job and determine when it’s time to experiment or change. And with the platform approach, that change is straightforward.

The platform reduces switching costs and friction associated with implementing new SaaS applications. Rather than spend time working out new SaaS agreements with different vendors and then more time integrating the application, users simply leverage the platform to build additional applications into a new supply chain. And when peaks in demand call for a boost in cloud infrastructure capacity or an increase in software usage, the platform also can manage utilization, spinning resources up and down as needed.

For the many media organizations shifting their content preparation workflows to the cloud, a platform approach offers unique agility in applying just the right tools and resources to any job or project, as well as time and cost savings in implementing and managing those tools.

Geoff Stedman is the chief marketing officer for SDVI.