Media Dojo

What day is it?

Summer is quickly drawing to Labor Day and I’ve hardly looked up from the screen, either at home or on a plane, in which I’ve spent a fair chunk of the summer. I’ve not been posting because I’m in the midst of helping one of the top three media companies put together a big-assed proposal for a media services cloud (soup, nuts, everything). We’re racing to a mid-September deadline. Then, like all things corporate, we wait.

I’ll pass the time by writing a report on the media business in the cloud for GigaOm and get back to more regular posting and interviews.

Also, I’m going back to Monaco this November for the Monaco Media Forum in order to do a main stage panel on Media and the Cloud. It will be almost evenly divided between media players and cloud players…will provide more detail as we get closer.

In the meantime, I appreciate the patience and will be serving up a lot more tidbits once kids get back in school.

Last week, I went to San Francisco to be a part of GigaOm’s Structure conference. One of the best cloud events by far, Structure gave me an opportunity to sit down with Michael Crandell, the CEO of RightScale. For media players trying to wrap their head around cloud computing, the cloud management space RightScale leads is destined to become one of their first ports of call. It’s not simply a case that a media company needs a control panel for spinning up or shutting down servers. The bigger play hands down involves how to use a cloud management offer as the vehicle that carries a project from sketched on a napkin to hard-core deployment and operations without needing to change a lot of the fundamental plumbing. Bob highlighted some of the work RightScale does with media properties like ESPN and Zynga. As always, you can check the Media Dojo Tear Sheet–RightScale

Media Dojo : Please describe RightScale and the problem it solves

Michael Crandell: RightScale is a cloud management platform that lives on top of an infrastructure as a service cloud. The big problem we solve is allowing companies to get quick access to cloud infrastructure, namely fast provisioning, pay-as-you-go and dynamic workloads. It’s an entire cradle-to-grave environment for delivering cloud-based IT resources. RightScale itself is a SaaS platform that’s a web-based management system. From there, you get a portal if you will into all of your data center resources regardless of where they are, whether they are in the same public cloud, different public clouds and regions, private clouds or hybrids.

MD: How does that play out in practice?

MC: It’s everything from an operational dashboard that gives you real time information around lower level things like monitoring and alerts to a whole tracking and auditing function, which is critical in a cloud environment. In a world where resources come and go, people need to know “what happened on that server that was running last Monday and it’s gone now—and everything about it is gone.” The server may have been part of a cluster of 700 servers that launched to complete a huge batch job or a grid job. It may have been running in a transient, scalable app front end. Now it’s gone. So you need to be able to go back and look at log data. We also track cost data along with the operational stuff. We can cut it any number of ways depending on the goals of the customer. There’s a metering function within RightScale. Related to operations and cost functions, there is a whole set of tools to establish user roles and privileges. You don’t want everybody to be able to push the Big Red Switch that literally stops all servers. There needs to have a high level of admin access.

MD: That’s fine for the cost side of the ledger. What about the revenue side?

MC: There’s also the area of design and architecture. We have IP around a concept we call server templates. These are innovations on the idea of machine images that allow dynamic configuration of boot time servers so they can adopt their role effectively, whether you’re adding another app front end, load balancer, database slave etc. As that server is booting up, it can find out via the server template and RightScale that it’s part of a given load balanced array of web front ends, for example. The server knows where the other front ends are. It knows where the load balancer to register with is located. It knows where is the database that it’s talking to. All of that is set in a template. The configuration is predictable with the variable information being fed in at launch time.

MD: Let’s switch gears to talk about how you work with the media industry..

MC: We work with a variety of media clients like ESPN with their fan profile site during March Madness as well as Sony Music, which uses RightScale to power their artists fan sites all the way to e-commerce. We also work with Sling Media, which uses RightScale to do a lot of back end transcoding so that a slingbox can handle most anything you throw at it. Sling Media’s problem is that they have all this content coming in from publishing partners that needs to be prepped on-the-fly for a variety of devices ranging from a phone to a big screen TV with different resolutions and codings. That’s a big back-end grid transcoding operation. In the music space, we do a similar kind of job with Tunecore. Then there are the social apps and games, Facebook type stuff.

MD: What do you see really pushing the cloud in the media space?

MC: We see a couple of things. In the gaming space, the console games are now heavily networked, which means there’s a big cloud component anyway. Aside from enabling MMORGS, another important aspect is that games are increasingly being played on lightweight front-ends (browsers and phones). Asia is leading this push not only because of high end phones and networks but also because on average, the discretionary spend once you get out of Japan, Korea, urban China is often lower than what you find in North America and Western Europe. So you might end up spending $3-4 hard currency to go to an Internet café and purchase some Zynga bucks to play whatever game. Those are almost entirely cloud based, resource intensive and are driving a lot of adoption and innovation as the demand scales. Last time I checked, RightScale powers the top ten Facebook apps that aren’t published by Facebook itself.

MD: Last question, looking out 12 months, what are you seeing driving the bus for cloud computing and media?

MC: What’s becoming a reality are hybrid clouds. We started day one with running solely on AWS. More public clouds then came on line as well as low level cloud management software like Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, VMware,etc. It’s now possible to organize your own internal data center resources under the cloud model. From our POV, that’s about more choice for the customer. We’ve been doing a lot of work on the private cloud side. Doesn’t mean you repeal the laws of physics. You’re not going to have your database in Philly and your web tier in Austin or Seattle. But you might want to have a disaster recovery footprint on a separate power grid in another part of the country. In the media industry, I think there will be a lot more streaming simply because the competitive thrust will be about getting media to the customer however, whenever they want it. People will also own copies of their content. Bandwidth has become fast enough to make that a reality. The cloud will be more important for powering that. Never forget, the lighter weight the device you’re using, the more that power needs to be somewhere like the cloud.

Of course I’m biased, but GigaOm puts on by far the best gathering of the cloud computing industry in June with Structure. All the C-level players who count will  be there: AWS, Salesforce.com, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, Cisco, AT&T, the list goes on.

I’ve got my 15min of fame on the second day at an “Ask the Analyst” session. Basically, it’s going to be the cloud equivalent of the bullring experience from high school football. For those of you who didn’t play, you get in the middle of a circle of players, coach nods at someone, and they charge at you from any direction to try to knock you on your butt. And as the good book says, it is truly better to give than to receive.

Given that it’s a hard-core tech-savvy audience in San Francisco, I expect some very hard hitters coming my way. Keeps one on their toes.

Equally important to my analyst duties, I’ll be prowling the guest list of behemoths, start-ups and VCs on behalf of my major media client. Cloud is fundamental to a HUGE transformation they’re funding with some serious dosh. I’ll be collecting contacts for a corporate version of “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” depending on the particular execs.

Should be fun.

Post Structure there will be a lot more interviews on site plus some of initial thoughts from the ongoing research I’m doing for GigaOm Pro on the consumer media business in the cloud. This is bullring on steroids.

I’ve been submerged the past few weeks for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal side, we’re selling my 89 year old mother’s house, which has 45 years worth of stuff crammed into it. For those of you who’ve walked in those shoes, you feel the pain.

Professionally, I’ve started a consulting project with the senior operations people at one of the top five global media companies. You love their music, movies and plug in their consumer electronics—get the drift? I can’t give a lot of specific detail for NDA reasons. But it’s no great secret that the physical supply chains for media (eg. from a master file to a CD/DVD sitting on the shelf at Wal-Mart) are undergoing profound change.  I don’t think there’s a clean flip from all physical to all digital production and distribution of media. People still like to own *stuff* at the end of the day.

That said, the transition to a new media supply model has cloud computing written all over it. Go ahead and Google “Digital Supply Chain” to see why. The number of linkages between finished and semi-finished media goods, co-mingled professional and user-generated content, commerce and community functions suggests that the cloud just might be the only institution capable of taming that kind of complexity. There’s definitely no lack of challenge here.

I’ll document some lessons learned in a couple of months.

Next week on 27 May, I’ll be talking about media cloud computing at a bootcamp for visual journalists. The event will take place in Langley, WA—about a hour and change north of Seattle. Some top notch talent in the form of Brian Storm from Media Storm, Tom Kennedy ex-Washington Post multimedia director and now head of Kennedy Multimedia, as well as Paige West, Director of the Interactive Studio at MSNBC, will be joined by a clutch of other visual journalism practitioners to spend a day laying out the planets and then another day of hands-on multimedia production via Media Storm.

My role as the cloud guy will be to convince people to break the bias that success revolves around having the best stories on a given web site. Creating content as a function of a destination runs into the wall of the mobile, social web—just ask Yahoo! which is trying for the umpteenth time to get people to come to its site for their content. They just bought Associated Content, which has many observers shaking their heads. Content, visual or not, acts more like software to feed devices and use cases. Context rules. Content ain’t the king it used to be.

I’m beating the drum that visual storytelling will find its way into applications and services, things that will be found on computing clouds more than cable head ends or media servers. Story becoming software is a regular meme for me, one which I’ve taken to numerous audiences to present and have tempered by questions. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s still time for registering. I hope to see you there.

I signed away part of my summer yesterday. I’ll be diving into a hard-core research project on consumer media in the cloud for GigaOm Pro. It’s the kitchen sink: music, video, games, apps, docs—all wrapped in social, mobile and cloudy stuff.

After I plow through the more or less standard set-up: cloud media definition, examples, driving forces, roadblocks, who’s up and who’s down; it’ll be time to get to the more interesting questions in my opinion. To wit, who will own the interoperability of media across services, which is the best business (handling Big Data or handling meta-data?), privacy/anti-trust. Bottom line I think is that media strategy is no longer about using the web for a destination as much as using it for distribution to a boatload of devices, contexts and business models.

Anyway, that’s the raw thinking one day in. Ping me with some ideas or contacts at john.gauntt <at> media-dojo.com.

Mike Dano, Managing Editor of FierceMarkets Wireless Group, interviewed me and others about mobile cloud computing. It’s a good overview of the current state of play.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/cloud-computing-quiet-requirement-mobile/2010-05-04

I’ve been sketching an outline for my next report for GigaOm Pro on cloud computing and consumer media. I’ll give a head’s up on the final version when it’s done late this month or early this month. So this thinking is still raw.

My nose tells me that the recent tiffs between Apple/FLASH, Google TV/CATV, Facebook/everyone else is indicative of a larger trend. It seems like the professional media industry is starting to say, “we’ve given this information wants to be free stuff a good 15 year run on the web. To show for it, we’ve been gutted. Going forward, we’d rather cut a deal with a Cupertino/Mountain View/Redmond devil and get a slice of a real pie.” I know this doesn’t sit well with the John Perry Barlow crowd. But then again, he had made his money being chef to the Grateful Dead before he got all cyber libertarian.

Being a media snob, I’ve been looking hard to find the multi-billion $ media content company that launched on the web. I’m still waiting. The market cap went to technology and aggregation plays, not a new media experience. To a large degree, it’s the incumbent media industry’s fault. Jeff Jarvis is tedious with his standard schtick about old media’s problems. But it doesn’t make him any less wrong. The fact is that the revolution came and instead of devouring its young, it feasted on print publishing and music. It’s licking its chops over video. That’s been the steady cycle for 15 years.

But going forward, there’s not a hell of a lot of analog transmutation left. Either the media industry (however owned) needs to start working the revenue side of the ledger with truly new experiences in storytelling, or it can continue feeding off the corpse of the old world and cede the ground to the Googles of the world entirely.

Enter cloud computing. Sure, the initial advantage rests with the technologists and device guys. But the difference this time is that the same technology DOES allow a media content start-up to scale linearly should it manage to capture lightning in a bottle. The first green shoots are being found in transmedia properties, especially the next generation ones like we’re seeing with my friend Brent Friedman’s Valemont franchise. Brent doesn’t base his business anymore just on selling copies of the story or restricting access to it. The story has become a world in which the audience can dwell and participate; a world that provides multiple avenues for monetization; and a world in which competitive advantage involves how fast and how well Brent or his users can customize the experience at the margin. Mass customization trumps mass distribution in this scenario.

This tells me that control over the *context* of a media experience is becoming more important than control over the media itself. The range of devices, situations (e.g. location awareness), and business models has bumped complexity to a level to where a cloud-based platform would be the only one flexible and scalable enough to handle it. Fundamentally, the cloud makes media itself more intelligent. In a hard media (e.g. CD/DVD) or standard web (non-mobile, non-social) world, the media player and UI was all you needed because the media was stupid. All it needed to do was PLAY. Now, media must integrate with social identity, physical location, a preferred device, a specific service plan and a configurable bundle of rights for the consumer.

It’s a switch from a ROM-based media world to a RAM-based media world. That makes RUN the most important command.

That’s today’s take. As I dig deeper and start interviewing people to create this research, I’ll no doubt do some ADD/DROP to the meme. Naturally, comments/suggestions/pointers are most appreciated.

The tsunami of iPad analysis and commentary has been surprisingly sparse on the subject of how tablets and new storytelling forms will affect enterprises. Yet, if there’s any sector that desperately needs new tools and paradigms for communicating a story that includes numbers, formulas, analysis and context, it’s the enterprise market.

So it was good late last week to re-connect with MellMo, a data visualization company based close to San Diego in Del Mar, CA. The company’s flagship application is called Roambi (“roaming business intelligence”) and was the topic for a September 2009 post by MD, including a Roambi Tear Sheet.

In a sentence, Roambi takes business data and information locked in XLS, PDF, and other common desktop formats and re-rolls them for access, navigation and presentation on an iPhone. More than simply transcoding one format to another, Roambi re-interprets the data according to a palette of iPhone optimized visualizations. I spoke with Quinton Alsbury, co-founder and President of MellMo about the current state of data visualization on Romabi as well as how iPad is a different development animal from iPhone.

Media Dojo: Let’s get a quick update on Romabi during the past 6-8 months

Quinton Alsbury: We’ve had a huge uptake in server licenses (around 50K), including several Fortune 500 companies, which is great because there had been a lot of skepticism whether companies would invest in a large iPhone-centric enterprise system. As of last week, we became a SAP endorsed business solution. That means that SAP’s tech team did a full technology due diligence on Roambi and have endorsed it as something for their customers to purchase. This includes direct sales by the SAP sales force. So it’s important validation for a two year old start-up. In terms of adoption, we’re finding that industries with large field forces like pharma, biotech and consumer products have latched onto Roambi because it hits their remote business needs right out of the gate. Another important market for us involves executive teams that need synced, updated mobile access and interaction with corporate data systems given that on any given day, there’s probably a healthy percent of a management team in the air or meeting at a client site.

MD: What’s been the important changes to the platform in the last six months?

QA: Let’s split things into server-side and device-side changes. On the server-side, we’ve expanded the connections of our publishing system to include other major enterprise data sources. We focus on providing visualizations for business intelligence uses. Translated, that means we take the desktop output of general business applications like Excel as well as specific business intelligence applications like SAP, Salesforce.com,or Business Object and reformat it for display and interaction on the iPhone. We’ve grown that list of enterprise applications that we can tap into to include IBM Cognos, Microsoft Reporting Services and Sharepoint, Liferay [ed. NOTE: an open source version of Sharepoint], and Google Apps.

In the last instance of Google Apps, we have a hosted SaaS version called Romabi Pro. This allows companies to purchase Roambi access through their Google Apps account. From there, Roambi integrates with all of their Google Apps documents and spreadsheets hosted in the cloud. The end-user doesn’t need to do anything to use the system. A company’s Google Apps administrator buys access through their Google Apps account and all the licensing passes through. In fact, we don’t even know the ID of the end-user, just the fact that Company X bought Y number of licenses via Google Apps.

MD: What about the device side?

QA: We reproduced everything in the iPhone visualization to run in FLASH on a web browser. In speaking with customers, we had a lot of requests from people who wanted to stick with their Roambi visualization even after they returned to their desktop or laptop PC. So we productized the process so that when you publish something for the Roambi iPhone version, it’s also going to run native on the PC web browser via FLASH. We had one large customer that bought several throusand Roambi licenses for a massive iPhone roll out. They didn’t yet have the iPhones in place but decided to use the FLASH version in the meantime because they said it looked great.

MD: Why would they be so concerned about a browser-based FLASH version of a mobile app?

QA: I don’t know whether iPhones or iPads will replace PCs. In some instances they will. In others, they won’t. But it’s a foregone conclusion that people are just as likely to be accessing and manipulating a file  on a phone as they will on a laptop. It kind of depends on what device they grab off their desk when they walk out the door or walk across the hallway. They may grab their laptop. They may grab their phone. Being able to support that experience and keep it consistent across all those different devices is our goal.

MD: Turning to iPad, what’s been your experience porting the Roambi system over to that platform? [Ed. NOTE: Roambi started out as a pure-play iPhone OS shop]

QA: I own most of the product features and user interface design for Roambi. When we started two years ago, our challenge involved taking all this desktop formatted data and and creating a new way of interacting with it, but interacting with it inside a 3 X 2 inch screen. And that restriction forced us into design ideas that stripped out a lot of desktop oriented assumptions about how people used data. Because you have so little real estate you just can’t throw everything there. You need to take users through a more scripted, tight experience that leads them to the story that the data is trying to tell. Those were the guidelines we baked into the application when we were designing for the phone.

And then all of a sudden, we get a device like iPad that has a bigger screen again. But our customers discovered that the way in which we presented data and navigation choices on the phone proved more effective and engaging than the traditional desktop solutions. So we took the solutions we made for the phone and brought them into the iPad, trying to make them more immersive and provide more context to the data being displayed. However, we wanted to keep the clean, quick look and feel of a mobile app. Going forward, I think we will design our phone-based visualizations first because the restrictions there are what drive the innovation. And then we will look at how we might use a bigger screen to make that more effective. When you’re faced with constraints you’re pushed to solve problems and come up with new ways to addressing them. In that sense, we look at them as virtues rather than obstacles.

Now you know why I went to Japan. The cherry blossoms in Kyoto were perfect as was the day we shot these pictures of my daughter dressed as a maiko. There have been a raft of syrupy, cliche-riven tomes written about cherry blossom season, which is another way of saying that the only true currency we possess is time. Spend it wisely. There are truly moments that come only once in life. Her name is Akane, which means the color of the morning glory. She’s 14 years old. And I love her deeply.

I’ll get back to posting about media and cloud computing later this week.