Perifery’s Senior Sales Director, Peter Watling, recently invited MediaCloud’s CEO, Marc Eckstein, to join him on a webinar to discuss the partnership between the companies and how their collaborative efforts are transforming the M&E sector in South Africa.
The session began with an exploration of the collaboration between MediaCloud and the Object Matrix technology. Marc first shared how MediaCloud had been created in response to industry frustrations around the high cost of internet access, which was charged at a Gb rate. Deciding it was an unfavorable and unfair way to continue, MediaCloud began offering fast connections to customers, with high-speed file transfers around the world following. The demand for storage soon followed, and in looking for an alternative to public cloud solutions, Marc decided that Object Matrix was the right fit for customers. “We wanted an object storage solution to provide to our customer. Multi-tenanted, S3 connection, to provide a good, cost-effective alternative to public cloud. It would sit on the MediaCloud network, so customers would be in control of prices.”
Elaborating on the partnership, Pete explained that MediaCloud had initially purchased an on-prem deployment of Object Matrix – Marc adding that it was a 288TB deployment – and MediaCloud customers began using it as a storage as a service. Pete also noted that it was this partnership that kicked off the global offering of OMcloud. He discussed the synergy between the companies and their technologies, noting that they were both aligned on providing services above and beyond expectations.
The discussion moved to explore the success and impact of OMcloud on MediaCloud's operations. Marc highlighted the significance of Vision, OMcloud's browser-based asset management system, sharing that customers were finding immense value in the Vision interface, which comes as a part of the system. Pete emphasized the advantages of using Vision, pointing out that it allows customers to avoid hidden charges often associated with public cloud solutions. Marc shared that Vision has had a great impact on MediaCloud’s offering, adding that as the application progresses, it promises to integrate with more third-party offerings for the upload and download of media.
Describing Object Matrix, Marc highlighted its resilience and ease of use. The pair discussed the simplicity of the platform, highlighting that administrators can be onboarded within 20 minutes, and are then able to manage and access content without relying on personnel with a specific skill set.
Pete asked Marc what’s in store for MediaCloud’s future, to which he shared his prediction of a move away from public cloud solutions, mainly due to cost. He also shared that customers are wanting to connect at highspeed, and MediaCloud can provide that connectivity direct into storage. With the proliferation of 4K and 8K resolutions, Marc shares the need for more bandwidth. He shared MediaCloud’s goal of bringing customers closer to their storage, highlighting their ability to maintain data sovereignty by keeping and accessing content from within the country. Marc also foresees more hybrid scenarios playing out, with media stored on-prem and pushed to off-site for disaster recovery and backup.
Marc rounded up the conversation by the excitement around Perifery and the company’s offerings. Sharing that customers are particularly interested in integrations and metadata, he said, “It’s a big deal. Being able to access files through Vision and use the metadata tags created with AVID (for example) is great for media companies. The more of that type of development, the better.”
Watch the webinar on-demand now.
