Mild, medium or spicy? A solution for every cloud flavour preference

Adding spices to food can elevate a dish instantly – going from tasty to extraordinary in a matter of seconds – but it requires certain skills and an understanding of flavours to get the recipe just right. Similarly, the adoption of SaaS for video delivery has the potential to elevate businesses, but doing it right requires a team of experts who specialize in the right “ingredients” for customers’ individual palettes.

Despite the fact that the video industry has been a late adopter of SaaS, the cloud has been a hot topic for the past 10–15 years. For some – including many of our customers – cloud migration has been successful and delivers great ROI, but others are still cooking up the best approach for their migration plans. No matter where they are on their cloud journey, we’re here to serve them.

That said, the cloud provides an array of benefits, the biggest ones being flexibility, operations, and cost savings.

Benefits of Adding Spice

The flexibility of the cloud is especially true with streaming – which is quickly becoming the predominant way to watch TV. There are so many unknowns when it comes to streaming: what will it be like in five years, the number of end users, fluctuation with churn, etc. A system that can adjust the service configuration as fast as users are evolving is a must. That’s why flexibility is so crucial.

The operational benefits of SaaS are also hard to ignore. With it, we make super complex things, super easy. Transitioning to the cloud requires some level of reactivating your software and operations – you don’t operate cloud headend the same way you would on-prem headend. Many customers can’t afford to glue complex systems together and need a more end-to-end approach where they only have one face to complain to – another great benefit of SaaS for the customer.

The most important benefit we’re seeing is the cost savings from leveraging the cloud. Previously the cloud has been seen as an expensive place, especially for 24/7 streaming – which is true if you don’t redesign your architecture – however, the cloud is much more cost-efficient if you take the whole equation into account.

With all its great benefits, most can agree that the future of the cloud is now.

However, some service providers are still – and for very good reasons – on-prem focused. Still, they may embrace the SaaS transition or be migrating to the cloud, but we’re all at different stages. At Synamedia, we aim to support every customer, regardless of where they are in their cloud transition.

While we live and breathe SaaS, we’ve seen use cases where it makes sense to stay on-prem, which is why we have product lines to support each and every stage and customer.

Mild

Prefer to keep the cloud flavour at a minimum and stay on-prem? We’ve got a solid solution for you. Synamedia Solid is a hardware/software appliance that is really at the core of our video network suite. All customers have a Synamedia Virtual Digital Content Manager (VDCM) at hand, and its reputation is reliable and solid – and we wanted to leverage that, so we built a full line. The scope of Solid is for primary distribution with everything from PowerVu to our CDN – it truly covers the whole range of video delivery workflows for both OTT and broadcast, and is designed to address all of your processing and distribution needs for 24/7 operations.

Medium

If you’re looking for a bit more cloud flavour, our Synamedia Vivid offering relies on the same Solid software components but adds a cloud native seasoning to it in terms of software, system architecture and operations. This solution is meant for customers transitioning to the cloud and have specific requirements. With Vivid, Synamedia manages the infrastructure, so customers can focus on what’s important – their business. Vivid builds on top of the Solid components, covering everything from primary distribution to CDN, with OTT and broadcast in the middle.

Spicy

If you’re ready to go all in, Synamedia Quortex is the answer. Quortex is our multi-tenant SaaS self-service, end-to-end SaaS platform. It offers a wholly pay-as-you-go model – providing both flexibility and simplicity. Flexibility because it’s pay-as-you-use, with little risk as there’s no payment upfront. And simplicity because it’s an end-to-end platform that is easy to use – making complex things simple for the end user.

One flavour – mild, medium or spicy – isn’t necessarily better than the others, it’s a preference and a matter of where you are on your journey. What’s more is that these products go hand-in-hand, and customers shouldn’t choose between them. It should be Quortex and Vivid, rather than or. And a lot of our customers are going with this strategy and combining our products – for example, our solutions are working together to deliver a low latency stream. Our strategy is really putting our customers first – they are the driving force behind our approach.