Cloud Computing is the latest buzz word amongst the various
industries across the globe as seen in the chart below.
Sources:
Cloud computing survey 2009, World Economic Forum and Accenture
Companies are focusing on improving processes and
performances by exploring and utilizing the varied features of the cloud to
gain a competitive edge in the market.
In this post, I am going to talk about the
implications of cloud computing and specifically how it is being leveraged in
the Media industry. In fact, one common axiom amongst the people in media industry
today is Cloud Computing. So let’s explore what all this noise is about.
Let’s hear what Dominic
Cameron, director of ITV Live, said a year ago in his talks with Rackspace about how Cloud Computing is changing the
Media Industry.
Cloud computing has not only helped media companies
to reduce the time to market, achieve scale, deliver great mobile experience
and save millions of dollars but also
led to the development of innovative and
impressive products to view and share content across social networks.
I am fascinated by Flipboard’s new advertisement “Now
You Can Create Your Own Magazines on Flipboard”.Flipboard, one of the world’s first social magazines, started with a purpose to redefine the way people consume and share content. Flexibility and scalability of the cloud solutions enabled Flipboard to bring Social Magazine to market in just record six months and increase its customer base. It utilized Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build its infrastructure and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for all their server side processing.
Greg Scallan, Chief Architect at Flipboard, says, “We were able to go from concept to delivered product in approximately six months with just a handful of engineers, in large part because of the ability to deploy within a working cloud infrastructure very quickly.” Utilizing the cloud solution enabled Flipboard to reduce the time to market and to cut down on operational costs. (AWS Case Study: Flipboard)
Flipboard founder Mike McCue gives you an inside look into new Flipboard 2.0.
Let’s also look at the how media industry’s behemoths such as Wall Street Journal benefited from the enormous power of cloud solutions. WSJ wanted to manage the sales components of its print and online products more effectively and also gain more insights into its sales pipeline. To achieve this, WSJ partnered with Salesforce and said,
” We used Salesforce to build our own CRM in keeping with our vision. It's extremely easy to use, integrate, and customize.”
Cloud solution, Sales cloud, from Salesforce facilitated WSJ to easily integrate CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system with an advertising data warehouse along with print and online advertising systems. This has enabled the advertising team to prepare proposals for digital opportunities quickly and also customize the sales contracts. Salesforce gives the WSJ a consistent face across all print and digital advertising products and also fosters strong relationships with clients. (Sales Cloud: WSJ)
Other media agencies such as Time Warner, who lacked tools to analyze critical business data, also used Salesforce’s cloud solution. It could save significant amount of time for standard business activities and up the team productivity by 10%. (Warner Story)
Cloud Computing has also flourished in the eastern
hemisphere. Medialogica, a Russian Media analyst company, could reduce its data
center maintenance cost by 50% once it moved the indexing portion of its
solution to Windows Azure, a
cloud platform from Microsoft. Thus Vsevolod Vanchikov Chief Technology
Officer, Medialogica quoted,
“Crawling
excellence is a key competitive differentiator for us…. After moving to Windows
Azure, we achieved guaranteed 80 percent of on-time content delivery and doubled
the amount of indexing cycles per hour.” (Sources: Microsoft
casestudies)