SVG Sit-Down: Cloudian CMO Jon Toor Believes Object Storage is a Financial Win for Content Owners S3 standard has opened the door to a wealth of new opportunities By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - 10:53 am
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Digitizing media assets for storage, management, and monetization is one of the great challenges facing the sports video production industry today. As technology develops, solutions become more cost-effective, and established standards streamline the process, there's more opportunities today to cut through the clutter and tackle what can be an - at times - overwhelming task.
A technology company on the rise, Cloudian, exhibited at its own booth at the IBC Show for the first time, and, after recently adding compatibility to Microsoft Azure, Cloudian's cloud-based storage solutions now support all three major clouds - Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Jon Toor, Chief Marketing Officer, Cloudian
SVG got the chance to visit Cloudian in their San Mateo, California offices and speak with the company's Chief Marketing Officer Jon Toor about standards, his takeaways from IBC and how bringing cloud storage to on-prem data centers is changing how people view and utilize their historical archives.
What were your big takeaways from the IBC Show last month
The customers we met at IBC and NAB Show in Las Vegas were very similar in a lot of regards. The overarching trend is the need to reuse assets, monetize media, and get out that media quickly to enable that reuse. We also see the need to accelerate workflows. People have a constant need to get things done faster because we're now being expected to produce more content for more types of devices shown in more formats and get all of that stuff done in record time because individually pieces aren't bringing in the massive cash flow, it's the aggregate of all of the different things you've got going on. That really increases the pressure to get at media quickly.
That's what Cloudian enables. Instead of locking media away in an archival format that is inherently slow to access, now for about the same cost we can let you put that media on something which you can instantly access. That difference in accessibility means now you can get the work done faster and in different ways because now you have the time to produce it in different formats or to get at old assets and resue them in ways you couldn't before.
With our clients in the media and entertainment space, by moving into this type of storage which is instantly accessible yet infinitely scalable - it opens up new doors in how you can use these assets so now you have new avenues to monetize.
When a prospective client approaches you with a girth of content on tapes and they want your help, how do you onboard them? Do you digitize in chunks? Do you advice that they digitize content as they need it?
That's always the challenge. What we recommend is go from the current, back. Start from the present. That's the stuff that you're going to be more frequently re-using and you are going to get the most value right away. That being said, keeping that information on tape and maintaining its accessibility costs you money everyday. You think that the tape just sitting on the shelf is free. In reality, its just like owning a car. That car sitting in your driveway is not free. Its consuming depreciation. Its consuming maintenance costs. Even though its just sitting there. About half of your costs of owning a tape is actually tied up in refreshing that media every five years. We've actually heard of clients that are rereading their tapes every two years because they are very concerned about making sure that data remains readable.
So the faster that you can get it on a medium which is essentially evergreen, the sooner its going to start saving you money. We show people how we can save them money by moving data from tape on to spinning disk and they are often surprised by that. They think that, by definition, spinning disk is going to be more expensive and ten years ago, that was probably true.
[There are] a couple of things that have happened that have really changed that. For one, disk capacities have increased so much. Right now a hard drive is 10 terabytes. It doesn't cost any more than that drive did ten years ago, it just stores 100 times more information. The cost per gigabyte has come way down. The second thing that's happened is now enterprise storage - which is super scalable storage like we make - is run on industry-standard servers. It used to be that if you bought a server, that was limiting you in terms of scalability.
Now, with a software like Cloudian makes, you can make a whole stack of servers work together as one big device. So now you have the economies of that super capacity hard drive running in an industry-standard server stacking a whole bunch of them up and making them all act like one big storage system. That makes it both cost-effective and easy to manage.
Last month, Cloudian announced various integrations with Microsoft Azure and Cisco. You also mentioned that your solutions can marry various solutions together. How critical is it for your value that it be as easy as possible and low in friction?
That's really the beauty of it for our customers: standards drive value across every dimension that you look at. The storage industry is really driven by standards. The reason for that is because everyone benefits from the emergence of standards. By that I mean, the storage customer wants everything in their environment to play nicely together. You want your media asset managers to play well with your editing software to play well with tier 1 storage systems, etc.
What's happened in our particular brand of storage is that a standard has emerged ca
