HITS

HITS Advisory Services: M&E Industry Transforms IT Services to Scale

The media and entertainment industry has an opportunity to transform its IT services to scale globally this year, according to the newly created HITS Advisory Services and executives at AVANT Communications, Cornax Cloud Alliance and Equinix.

HITS Advisory — a no-cost resource offering studios and vendors alike avenues to learn from high-level specialists about new technologies that improve IT backbone services — should prove beneficial for all corners of M&E, according to Guy Finley, president of MESA, speaking during the Jan. 26 “HITS Advisory Services: Optimizing the M&E Industry for Scale” presentation, which featured presentations by Rackspace and MobiChord as well.

“HITS Advisory Services is meant to be a resource for our community,” he told viewers. “To give you an inside look into a particular piece of the business and also to give you an outlet and someone to speak with to solve your pressing issues and dig deeper in terms of the challenges you’re facing internally,” he said.

HMFR
The program is also “meant to be fun,” Finley said, stressing the importance of “HMFR – Have More Fun Regularly” despite the challenges that have been created by the global pandemic.

To that end, those taking part in the inaugural “live” event were treated to a performance by engineer-turned-comedian Don McMillan. He’s a top-rated stand-up comic with a master’s in electrical engineering who, among other things, is Bill Gates’ favorite comedian.

His energy and levity made the event light and enjoyable while still focusing on the technology that matters.

Cornax Cloud Alliance
David Goldman, CEO of Cornax Cloud Alliance who co-hosted the event, noted he was previously an agent and a manager to celebrities, who became an investor in the cloud sector.

“What I found out was no one company – especially a young company – could really be the complete solution,” he said. “Every studio is like a snowflake” in that “so often, you’re going into these places trying to just sell what’s on your limited line card and it’s not necessarily what’s best for the buyer or actually what they need.”

As a result, Cornax, he explained, is, “In a better position to service the customer ultimately no matter how large, no matter how small, no matter what they needed – anything involving cloud. And now we’re working with over 250 cloud solutions providers, and we deal with everything from infrastructure to security” and more.

What Cornax does, as a Trusted Advisor, is “advise when someone has a problem or a challenge in the technical area, and we will give them research, we’ll advise on trends, we will bring in engineers to [provide a] solution, and we’ll also procure and bring multiple bids so that ultimately the customer makes the right choice.” It can also negotiate better pricing for clients, he noted.

AVANT Communications
Today in the IT sector, “it’s all about … what can I do with others that I could never do by myself,” according to Drew Lydecker, co-founder and president of AVANT Communications. “We are truly an extension of your IT staff,” he said.

Pointing to the significance of Tesla on the automotive industry despite not existing 20 years ago as one example, he said the “rapid rate of change” being seen is “the only constant in [the] marketplace today.”

“Everything is changing in this world,” he said, adding: “Disruptive innovation in business is the reason for change in business…. Everything is being challenged because of disruptive innovation – and it’s happening faster and faster and faster.” The Nano Diamond Battery is another disruptive force in the sector, he noted.

He later provided a demonstration of AVANT’s Pathfinder Tool Platform that he said was built with artificial intelligence and machine learning. The platform was designed to “help decision-making and the pace of change of decision-making in a way that no other tool has,” he said.

Equinix
D.R. Carlson, senior global manager of colocation provider Equinix, noted his company was founded in 1998 and said he pointed that out “not just to brag that we made it through Y2K.”

He mentioned the year “because it’s a moment in time, and when I say it, many of us think about where we were – where we were working – and, through that lens, it doesn’t seem like that long ago.”

But that was 23 years ago. “Do you think a lot’s happened in our industry in the past 23 years? A ton,” he said. “As a matter of fact, not one of these companies was in existence 23 years ago,” he told viewers, pointing to companies including Airbnb, Alibaba Group, Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Hulu, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Spotify, Tesla, Twitter, Uber and YouTube. “When we start to think about it through that lens, we realize that was a lifetime ago,” Carlson said.

In addition to all being among the most successful companies in the world, they have something else in common, he said: “Every single one of them leveraged digital technologies not only to survive but, in some instances, to completely upend industries.” They have all digitally transformed themselves and the industries they are in and all went through the same process, starting with building out a digital infrastructure, “connecting it to a digital ecosystem of partners and then placing it as close to the end user as possible” – at what we call the “digital edge,” he pointed out.

“What’s interesting is this was our evolution as well,” he said. A key trend that we’ve seen over that time is that “content is no longer centralized,” he noted, adding “connections enable consumption” and “there are more cloud on-ramps inside of Equinix than anywhere else in the world.” Content and digital media companies now “have the ability not only to leverage the core infrastructure of the network service providers, but have the ability to also leverage all of the cloud service providers,” he said. And, “in these locations, they have the ability to do pre-production, production, post-production, as well as distribution,” he added.

Noting that “content requires the most efficient path,” he pointed to the importance of low latency and said that is one of the advantages that customers have when using Equinix. Eighty-eight percent of IT decision makers say low latency is the most important quality of their networks, he said, adding that what determines low latency is “the actual physical distance the packets have to travel.”

The next HITS Advisory Services event will take place after the Smart Content Summit on March 16.

To see a replay of the event or view any of the individual segments, click here. For more information and to have your questions answered, e-mail [email protected].