M+E Connections

Pune, India-based Tech Mahindra was first founded in 1986, and today is a $5.1 billion global IT services leader with more than 141,000 employees in 90 countries, helping 1,123 global customers, including Fortune 500 companies.

Sumit Grover, SVP and business head of media and entertainment for Tech Mahindra Americas, spoke with MESA about how the company helps media and entertainment firms improve their bottom lines, why its next-gen video and business technology stands out in a crowded field, and why its policy of “wellness before business” has helped it shine during the pandemic.

MESA: How did Tech Mahindra first come on the scene, and what makes its services stand out in the media and entertainment space?

Grover: A brand with over 35-years of heritage in technology services spanning multiple industries, Tech Mahindra brings proven expertise in IT and business services as the media and entertainment industry turns to new technology to solve the most complicated business challenges. Our capabilities are widely recognized by leading analysts like Gartner, ISG, Forrester, and Everest, among others.

We help media and entertainment (M&E) customers discover and realize monetization and margin improvement opportunities around the end-user experience, content monetization and intelligent operations. We do so by simplifying the application of emerging technologies to resolve a client’s business problems. We help our customers run better, change faster and grow greater by launching new products and creating new revenue stream for them.

This includes integrated offerings spanning design, development, testing and specialisms across cloud, data and analytics, AI/ML, media asset management (MAM), and 5G to name a few.

MESA: What makes Business.NXT, Tech Mahindra’s next-gen video and business technology, a standout product for M&E clients, and where does blockchain tech come into the picture?

Grover: Tech Mahindra helps M&E businesses reimagine technology as a revenue driver rather than just a support function. Tech Mahindra believes in offering the NXT.NOW advantage to its customers across the globe by sitting at the intersection of change.

In line with NXT.NOW is, our ‘Business.NXT’ offering that further exemplifies the promise of integrating multiple technology levers under one solution to help drive higher monetization and margins.

Business.NXT for M&E consists of:

• AI/ML-driven automated content discovery and metadata enrichment
• OTT video management platform with built-in audience analytics and IP protection
• Media Pipeline: A workflow automation solution, compliant with the MovieLabs 2030 vision, to enable a multi-cloud pipeline to create and distribute content matched to today’s rampant demand.
• Infrastructure, network, applications (ERP, CRM, production), data, and AI/ML
• Blockchain-based content supply chain management

Our plug-and-play blockchain-based contracts and rights management system (bCRMS) allows content creators, production houses, fulfillment organizations, and distributors to integrate smart contracts and distributed ledgers into their existing systems.

This ensures transparent payments and contracts between various stakeholders in our complex ecosystem — actors, producers, distributors, content distributors and end-consumers.

It orchestrates the entire media content life cycle across pre-production, post-production, and distribution phases, providing a common platform among stakeholders that:

• Simplifies and automates contractual complexities
• Enables track and trace media content usage across the entire content value chain
• Restricts unauthorized access to content and its redistribution
• Provides an authenticity check for transactions.

MESA: What impact has COVID-19 had on how Tech Mahindra does business, and in what ways has the company met the challenges presented by the pandemic?

Grover: COVID-19 disrupted a vast majority of businesses and helped accelerate digital transformation across industries as workers shifted to the remote working setup. At Tech Mahindra, we undertook a slew of initiatives to ensure the safety of our people, assets, and communities while being responsive to the needs of our customers.

We deployed our institutionalized Business Continuity Plan LIGHTHOUSE, which is an internally developed continuity toolkit and follows the industry’s best practices (ISO 22301).

Tech Mahindra has always believed in ‘wellness before business’ even before these tough times prevailed and continues to prioritize the same. With the onset of the global pandemic, the organization had ensured well-defined ‘work from home’ guidelines and ‘daily work management’ practices were in place to analyze employee productivity using collaboration tools and platforms. This also ensured service continuity for customers while monitoring and auditing for information security, IT infrastructure availability, and customer compliance in the WFH environments.

Beyond the office, we also undertook 355 projects with 180 partners to provide relief measures to over 2 million individuals across communities. We stood in support of our employees and their families through a dedicated help desk, Rapid Action Force and SOS teams. Virtual programs were organized for our associates to help them work around the uncertainty that the pandemic brought in and to cope with the anxiety. As an organization, we believed in staying connected and empowering everyone to ’Rise’.

COVID presents an opportunity for all organizations to reevaluate how they operate – which functions can be moved remote, how can staff remain productive and collaborative even if not physically together, and how can we turn this disaster into an opportunity to reinvent the way that we work.

MESA: How much crossover from these other industries does the company see with media and entertainment, in terms of what you provide, and have breakthroughs in other industries helped Tech Mahindra benefit M&E clients?

Grover: We consistently cross-leverage expertise from our work with top Fortune 500 companies across industries and geographies to help our M&E clients with their business model, platform, and infrastructure. Our leadership in 5G networks equips us to help digital media brands benefit from the enterprise 5G revolution and adopt new business models. Our acquisitions of BORN Group, Bio, Mad Pow, Pininfarina and Eventus enable us to bring end-to-end customer experience management capabilities from vision to execution.

Engagements with top clients from consumer technology, automobile, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and retail sectors have enhanced our skills in transforming the customer experience in the M&E industry to the new direct-to-consumer (D2C) reality.

Our award-winning platforms like GAiA (for AI/ML lifecycle management at scale) and BlueMarble Commerce (for product catalogs, order management, and channel activation built with cross-industry best practices) are ready to help M&E clients get to the next generation of hyper-personalized content and commerce. Our partnerships with cloud hyperscalers have enabled us to reimagine infrastructure and rebuild the entire media supply chain in the cloud and use our enormous buying power to lower barriers to entry for all media organizations.

M&E is a unique business sector and Tech Mahindra is best placed to bring forth new levels of agility, experience, and cost effectiveness to our industry.

MESA: What are some of Tech Mahindra’s favorite use case stories to date, where media and entertainment companies made significant use of your services?

Grover: An American console, PC, and mobile games publishing leader wanted to enable in-game e-commerce for third-party publishers with targeted offer management for upselling and cross-selling. We helped them build a multi-tenet, configurable and scalable SaaS platform with a shopping cart, wish list, gifting option, auctions, trading, and built-in analytics for customer segmentation based on demographic and behavior patterns.

The client witnessed more than 10% increase in revenue through up-sells, cross-sells, and promotions management, as well as a substantial cost reduction by leveraging lower cost delivery centers.

An American telecommunications giant with pay TV services was looking to design, architect and build its live TV/VOD streaming service in the cloud with dynamic ad insertion and integration with an online video player. We helped them develop the capability to take their TV/OTT services to all devices with migration from quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) to IP-based delivery, more intelligent local ad insertion, complex search, concept linking, manual polarity tagging to classify content, and proactive monitoring of systems and applications to reduce support requests.

A leading OTT platform in Southeast Asia was looking to improve its end-user quality of experience (QoE). It was suffering from performance lag between content distribution network servers in Asia and the origin servers in San Diego. They intended to enhance their QoE by adopting a cloud migration strategy to reduce network latency.

We helped them with a one-time high-volume data transfer of enormous size in their data center (300 million objects and 560 TB in size) to the cloud from US West to the Singapore Asia Pacific region.

All this was done while maintaining data hierarchy required for OTT playback. We also implemented cloud sync for continued ingestion moving ahead, helping them reduce the network latency for subscription-based video-on-demand and transactional video-on-demand by 50% and 70% respectively. We also enhanced the end user experience, improved performance, and reliability within a tight timeframe of two months.

MESA: What is next for Tech Mahindra, what advances in your M&E industry offerings do you see on the horizon?

Grover: Our next generation of solutions are designed to help digital media brands reach their monetization and margin goals. With the entire content supply chain reimagined for the cloud and in partnership with industry leaders, we are simplifying access to capabilities around video, broadcasting, measurement, and personalization by introducing ‘as-a-service’ models.

Our video-as-a-service offering provides an end-to-end OTT platform with cloud playout, automated testing, and archival services.

Our broadcasting-as-a-service offering converts CAPEX to OPEX while enabling live channels in the cloud with station re-engineering and optimization. Measurement-as-a-service brings audience behavioral understanding to digital media brands for the new D2C landscape. It also further drives the personalization-as-a-service offering which allows AI-powered custom metadata extraction and multi-functional videos.

Standing true to the NXT.NOW philosophy, Tech Mahindra’s next-gen offerings are ready to help digital media brands simplify to scale up and achieve competitive dominance.