With three years away from an in-person IBC event it was difficult to predict how this year’s show would go. Based in hall 10, we had a great location and we were excited to welcome our colleagues and friends from Europe and other parts of the world. This was the first time that we have had the opportunity to show our smartWork NoCode cloud native Media Integration Platform to the European M&E community and it didn’t disappoint. Before the show opened our sales team had filled their schedules with meetings and with 37,000 visitors from 170 countries throughout the four days the stand was busy with current and potential customers who were all interested in smartWork’s unique concept in the market.
The show was a time of coming together and of celebration and we were delighted to be presented with a TVB Europe Best of Show Award for smartWork. It’s an honour that our media integration platform has been recognised and has been so well received by our existing and potential customers and by the industry.
Looking around the show and at the news coming out of the busy conference sessions, as expected “cloud” and “remote working” were major trends and it was interesting to see how different vendors were presenting their cloud solutions. In an article in the IBC Daily, Tracey Geist, Global Head of Games and Media & Entertainment Marketing at AWS said, “While each customer’s cloud journey is unique, we are seeing some overall trends. Broadcasters are shifting television channel ingest, processing, creation and distribution options from ground to cloud, generating time and resource savings across the media supply chain.” *
The uniqueness of every installation is a key point. The challenge for broadcasters and content owners is navigating this new media landscape to find solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to their current and future specific needs without over complicating functionality. Because more and more software applications are now required, there are more tools than ever before for every part of the content supply chain and companies have to rely on a greater number of vendors.
Visitors to our stand were impressed by the concept of our smartWork NoCode Media Integration Platform, particularly how the technology manages integrations and how one can be swapped for another in just a few clicks. They were also interested in how the media location is abstracted, and more importantly, that they could see it in action. This concept naturally allows business continuity, which is extremely important, as broadcasters can keep their current systems in operation and migrate when required. Also, using smartWork, they can deploy content to multiple cloud services as well as on-prems to enable a real hybrid cloud to allow business continuity and business scale-up at their own space, minimizing risk, maximizing ROI and reducing the total cost of ownership. Other companies in this space can deploy to the cloud (in some instances only one cloud service) or on-prems, but not in the same containerized way as smartWork.
Some of the main comments that our team received regarding smartWork were:
“The UI is really intuitive and clean. It’s all organized in a logical and sensible way.”
“We’re really impressed with how simple upgrades can be completed with smartWork.”
“Business Intelligence is great. It offers a comprehensive view of areas of the operation.”
“This platform really simplifies the operation.”
It’s really important to understand the fast-changing needs of the industry and respond with technology that not only solves these needs but provides future-proofing as technology continues to evolve. The IABM State of mediaTech Strategic Report prepared for IBC 2022** highlighted that 35 per cent of media businesses prefer hybrid cloud. The report says that “Preference for best-of-breed technology is driving hybrid cloud usage, though this is leading to further resource dispersion, increasing complexity for media businesses.” The report also says, “Preference for best-of-breed technology is also driving multi-cloud usage, though lack of integration and standardization between providers is increasing complexity for media businesses.” It also highlights that in the area of Content Supply Chain Investment, post pandemic investment in remote production has continued to grow.
smartWork is able to overcome many of the industry’s current cloud challenges. It provides a framework where all the systems are integrated in the same way, based on three key pillars: Common Interface; Common Datamodel; and Common Workspace, where applications go to the media and not the media to the applications. Our cloud native, NoCode approach revolutionizes productivity making the media integration platform accessible to everyone, from non-technical users to citizen-developers. And, because it follows Infrastructure as Code (IaC), smartWork can be deployed on-premises, on any cloud or in a hybrid architecture for incredible flexibility. Business continuity can easily be achieved with smartWork as the current systems can be integrated and improve operation by adding new business processes or cloud operation.
Other trends that were notable at the show were technical agility, adaptation to customers’ rapid business changes and collaborative approaches between vendors and customers.
After not knowing what to expect from IBC 2022, we were delighted with the number of visitors that came to the stand who were really interested in how smartWork can benefit their business and projects going forward, and we were really happy to meet in person in Amsterdam again after what’s felt like a long time away.
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Sources:
*IBC Daily 2022 Day 2:https://www.ibc.org/ibc-daily/the-ibc-daily-2022-day-2/8906.article
**IABM Strategic Report prepared for IBC 2022 by IABM https://iabm-cdn.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/31094542/IABM_State_of_the_Industry_IBC2022.pdf
