M+E Connections

Signiant Explores the Challenges of Managing M&E Cloud Costs at EES

Most media companies are now using the cloud in some way and the number one challenge that Signiant is hearing concerns managing and predicting costs, according to the company.

Signiant has been at the forefront of the cloud transition both in terms of operating its own Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform at scale and in helping most of the world’s top media companies on their cloud journeys, it says.

“We have over the last five years completely moved our business and our products into the cloud as” as part of a “cloud native transformation and moved at this point, I think, about 70 percent of our total revenue into a cloud native SaaS product architecture from old on-prem technology,” Rick Capstraw, chief growth officer at Signiant, said Sept. 21 at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES).

“We’ve learned a lot there. And as we are in the middle of moving content and media workflows around, we see a lot of the same things with our customers,” he said during the session “The Unique Challenges of Managing Cloud Costs in Media & Entertainment.”

During the session, Capstraw discussed insights learned along the way and common pitfalls to avoid on organisations’ cloud journeys.

Reflecting back, he said: “In order to scale at the level we wanted to, and with the security that we needed to, to be able to support our customers in our business, we had to start looking at the cloud.”

Fast forward and Signiant now has “over a million users on our global cloud platforms [and] 50,000 businesses connected across 200 countries around the world, and we’re moving 50-plus petabytes every month, all in the cloud,” he noted to provide attendees with a sense of the “kind of scope and scale in which we’ve gone through this transformation” at the company.

“We’ve seen a massive uptick in cloud input [and] output of the content and data that we’re transferring in the marketplace, and it’s accelerated massively in the last couple years,” he said.

Signiant launched its first cloud native exchange product media shuttle in 2015, he noted. “And it was small and it’s begun to grow.”

Meanwhile, he said: “What that’s really given rise to is an incredibly complex supply chain. I’m sure we talk about this in every single one of the presentations here today. But the ability to transform the way we’re doing business in the cloud is fantastic, but it also brings a tremendous amount of complexity and cost consideration, and changes to the economics of your business, of your customer’s business, the way you pay for and buy services.”

So there are “some good things, some bad things and some [things] just to be aware of,” he pointed out. “So, as you think about what you’re doing, either with your service, with your customer service in the cloud, all of the goodness and change to a workflow that the products can bring is highly efficient, but comes at an enormous cost.”

Most customers that Signiant surveyed recently went from “thinking about migration to thinking about how do I control what I’ve already migrated and where does it make sense really to focus going forward,” he said.

He added that 61%  percent of companies are “reporting that managing the cost of their cloud deployments is their top priority.”

Meanwhile, the way that both customers and vendors buy and sell products these days has “changed significantly because of the changes in economic model, in cost model, in usage,” and operating expenses vs. versus capital expenses, he explained, adding: “It’s something that really needs to be taken into consideration as you think about what you’re trying to accomplish, utilising new technology, [and] underestimating what it will actually cost you to roll [out] your own products.”

The Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) was presented by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Institute for Entertainment, Media and Sports (IEMS) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and was sponsored by Iron Mountain, Signiant, Whip Media, Atos, Fortinet, FPT Software, invenioLSI, Perforce, Vision Media, and EIDR.