 Hello, welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Tech Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode one kicking off a new series covering exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem to talk about accelerated media supply chain volume and velocity with AWS. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE, and today we're excited to have Jeff Staden, who's the chief marketing officer with SDVI, talking about media supply chain optimization. Jeff, thanks for coming on. You bet, thanks, John, appreciate you having me. This has been a great series really focusing on the hot tech partners in the ecosystem of AWS and cloud. Cloud has been a big part of all kinds of, kind of, I will say, optimizations and unlocking new potentials. It seems to be the theme for all the hot startups. Take a minute to explain what you guys do at SDVI, what you're all about, what you're positioning, and why are you winning. Yeah, thanks, John. SDVI is all about those things you just mentioned in terms of helping our customers really optimize what we call the media supply chain all the way from the moment content arrives at a media facility through all of the various versioning activities that have to happen to create the multiple distribution packages that are then sent out to all of their distribution partners. It's a ton of work that has to happen to get content. What UNIC on TV has gone through a lot of processing to get it to that point. And now to get it on any device and on any platform. And we help our customers really optimize those processes. We help them take advantage of cloud technology so that it's much more efficient. They're much more responsive to what's happening in the market and they're much more agile with how they're able to take advantage of new opportunities. The thing about the cloud trend has been interesting because you see what happened in the developer market with early days of AWS. I didn't have to provision a data center, I go to the cloud, put my credit card down, I'm in the market, next thing you know I'm a, I'm Dropbox or I'm Airbnb or I'm doing some really cool things on top of someone else's big CapEx spend. How is cloud native media changing the supply chain impact? And specifically what areas are impacted the most? I think one of the areas that's most impacted is that natural elasticity and scalability that you get with the cloud that you didn't have in your traditional on-premise data centers that were used by media companies to process all of their content. You had essentially a fixed capacity that you had to deploy in your data center. And in many cases, media companies would deploy that technology assuming the worst case. So that sort of designing for peak level load which meant most of the time you have a lot of underutilized assets. And when something big came along you might not have had the capacity to take advantage of. One of the great benefits of moving to the cloud is that now you can actually scale up or scale down the infrastructure that you need to meet whatever the demand is at that moment in time. And it's, so you get very, very good asset utilization obviously you get very good performance and this ability to precisely match the cost to the amount and value of the content that you're putting through the system. That's one of the things we hear a lot about is in the cloud, undifferentiated heavy lifting, automation, focus more on the creative. You guys are focused on optimization and you mentioned some of the things about right sizing or maybe optimizing. What is the media supply chain optimization equation? What is, how does it, how does your combined solution with SDVI on AWS enable optimization? Well, what we're doing is we're helping to help our customers to A, understand what are the right processes that they want to have? So basically take a look at are there workflows that can be redefined as we move to the cloud? And then once those processes are identified, what are the right resources to apply to those processes? Where can I use an automated tool running on an AWS server somewhere? And where do I still need to use humans and how can I make those humans much more efficient? How can I help improve their productivity by using some of the data that comes from the automated processing? So the SDVI platform tries to bring all of that together, help our customers essentially re-architect their supply chain to take advantage of all the benefits the cloud offers, but also make the manual tasks that will still inevitably be part of a supply chain make those manual tasks more efficient too. Could you explain the differences on the old way of doing things beyond premise, as you mentioned earlier, kind of the old way and the new way with the cloud-based for deploying some of the technical infrastructure needed to support your customers' media supply chain? As you pointed out, it's kind of, I won't say complicated, there's a lot of moving parts, but what specifically is the difference in cloud-based and on-premises old versus new for deploying the technical infrastructure needed to support customers? There's a few things. One is speed and flexibility, or two things, speed and flexibility. Speed meaning I can get more content through my environment because I can scale up the resources in AWS to take advantage of all their capacity and all of their elasticity that they provide. But I also have a lot of flexibility. I can scale up, I can scale down, I can change the tools that I'm using if I want. I have this freedom to select the best tool for each job in the supply chain. And when I had an on-premise environment, I was most likely fixed with what I had already selected because I had licenses that I had to try to burn off. When you move to the cloud and you move to more of a consumption model where you're only paying for what you're using and you're only paying for it as you consume it, we can do the same thing with a lot of the tools that media companies are using so that they're only paying for the actual use of the tool. They're not procuring licenses, they're not managing a new deployment. They can turn it on, try it out, they can experiment more. They can, as folks in the cloud world like to say, they can fail fast, but it's true. They can try new things without a huge upfront investment. And then if they like it, they can scale it up from there. Talk about the platform for a minute. Now that we talked about the market, we're going to get into the Amazon relationship in a second, but talk about your platform. What is it? And what's the key to success? What's the secret sauce? Why do your customers like it? Why is it working well? Think of the SDVI platform, which we call Rally, as kind of combining a number of capabilities along the lines of we help orchestrate a lot of the activities that are happening throughout a supply chain. We're provisioning the resources that are needed to support those activities. We're provisioning and deploying and activating the applications that are needed to run on that infrastructure to do that job. So think of the totality of all the jobs that have to happen in a supply chain. And the Rally platform is guiding those tasks, orchestrating those jobs, monitoring each of the steps in the chain, alerting people or operators when there's an issue that needs to be addressed manually or there's an error somewhere in the system. And then as you go through the whole supply chain, we're collecting all of this data about what's working and what's not working so that we can help our customers further optimize by using all of that data to make better decisions going forward. What's the customer profile look like? Is it the high end you mentioned before you came on camera? Warmup, Water Brothers, big media coming. Those got big workflows, very complicated. What's the persona? Does it go down to the long tail? Do you look at new brands emerging? Certainly digital, I can almost see cloud native. I mean, on your website it says cloud native media, love that. I mean, cloud native, what does that even mean? It sounds great. It means agility, more startups going to be using it. Are you seeing new kinds of brands emerge? What's the balance of the persona? Who needs your solution if they're watching it out there? Yeah, so we did start with some of the larger media companies in the world, which is on one level, a little unique for a startup to have some of its first customers be major companies like Warner Media at the time and Discovery at the time now combined. Sky, Fox Television, which is now Walt Disney. So we did start with a lot of those larger media companies who really had an incredible amount of content that they were trying to push through their supply chain and really had a lot of motivation to find more efficiency out of their whole operations. But what we're finding now over time is that different types of customers are coming to us. You mentioned companies that are in the digital realm because once they've got your content, once you've got your content in the cloud, why take it out? Why not do all of the processing and packaging and delivery from the cloud, which many of the digital properties do? We've also started to see a utilization of the rally platform by some of the studios in our market, in particular Sony Pictures is using the rally platform to help with its content deliveries. So really any company that has a content that they're trying to package up and prepare to hand off to delivery partners, those are companies that can benefit from optimizing that supply chain. Awesome, I'm looking forward to digging into it. Talk about the relationship with AWS. Obviously you're part of their showcase here featuring some of the leaders and companies in their industry, media entertainment obviously. What's that relationship look like between SDVI and AWS? So interestingly, we've been a partner with AWS almost since the beginning of our company. We started with a cloud-based approach. We're kind of lucky from the standpoint that we didn't have a legacy business that we had to protect or that we had to migrate to the cloud. We really could start from scratch, designing and architecting a solution that's truly cloud native, literally born in the cloud. And so together we worked very closely with AWS to make sure that the way we were architecting our system and our approach followed the best practices that AWS has well documented through their whole review process. We continue to work very closely with them to take advantage of new technologies that they innovate and bring to the cloud environment. We try to innovate on top of them. And so it's been a very close relationship with AWS and one that I think has benefited both of us from the standpoint of our ability to help bring customers and bring their supply chains to the cloud and AWS providing that infrastructure that is so critical to executing. Yeah, Jeff, great point. And also as you're in the cloud, one of the things that's clear historically, at least when you look back at the cloud 1.0 developers and enterprise data centers is with an API economy and you have Lambda and functions and all these cool tools and now generate AI, there's going to be a lot more partnering and integration with other companies. Can you share your thoughts on the ecosystem, the importance of that with partners, customers working together? Because your customers probably going to have other stuff in the cloud too. So there's platforms, there's tools and there's applications. How does STV-I bring these partners together within the cloud? Now, great question, John. And the importance of an ecosystem can't be understated because a media company is going to use a lot of different tools from several different vendors. And they may want to change those tools depending on what kind of job they're doing or maybe some new innovation that has come to the market. Think of Rally really the STV-I Rally product as a platform that brings together the kind of underlying AWS building blocks and then allows these third-party software vendors to deploy their application on the platform so they can be integrated into the supply chain. Today we've got over 50 third-party companies who have their applications available through Rally and most of them are available on a consumption basis, meaning you're only paying for the minutes that you use to run your content through those tools. And so it's been a very big part of our go-to-market strategy to embrace this ecosystem of partners and make their tools, make their applications available to our customers so they can integrate them into the supply chain without having to do any work just by basically selecting them from the Rally platform. What I love about the innovation is the supply chain really kind of highlights media supply chain, kind of the word highlights, kind of workflows, you think factory, things moving around, a lot of moving parts, things getting built. As it grows up, I'm sure you're going to have to deal with secure media supply chain because securing the software supply chain is the hottest topic right now in the open-source community and certainly with fakes and all kinds of media rights coming around the corner, I'm sure there's going to be a secure media supply chain coming. Any thoughts on that? Obviously it's something that people are talking about but not yet in the market. What's your thoughts on that? Well, security is a very hot topic for media companies. It's one of the things I care about most. It's how secure is your environment, how secure is the storage and the access to the content. Obviously you want supply chains to be secure, to only allow access to operators who are truly authenticated and approved to do their part in the supply chain. From our perspective, STBI, we've actually gone through a SOC2 audit and we do that every year to keep that current, to really hone and validate our support for those security standards that are out there. And we work very closely with AWS to make sure that we're implementing security and access control technologies that they have and we're taking best advantage of them. Jeff, final point as we wrap up here last minute. Share some anecdotes what you hear from customers about the product for the people watching that maybe a prospector might want to check out STBI. What are some of the highlights, sound bites, or testimonials you hear from customers? This thing never breaks, it's always reliable. I mean, what are they saying? What we hear most often is that many customers go into a project like moving their supply chain to the cloud and they go into that with the mindset of getting more efficiency out of their operations. What they find after they do it is while they did get efficiency, what they really got was agility, the ability to respond faster to changes in the market. And I'll give you some anecdotes. We've had one customer who went from, when they received content, it took them two hours to process every hour of incoming content, to validate it, make sure it was correct, it had all the right information. That has now gone to 20 minutes. So now those operators are three times more productive than they were before. We've had another customer tell us that what used to take them 16 hours can now be done in four minutes. And we had one customer or two customers that had a project and when they analyzed what it was going to take to do that project, it was going to take a team of five up to 60 days to execute this project. And when working with us, they were able to complete it in about 18 hours. What takes weeks now is days, days now are hours, hours are minutes. This is the new efficiency. This is the new model. This is the new supply chain. That's right. Jeff Steadman, Chief Marketing Officer at SDVI. Congratulations on being a hot startup and also industry leader and featured here talking about accelerated media supply chains velocity and volume with AWS. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Okay. Thank you everyone. I'm John Furrier, your host. This was industry tech partners showcase season one, episode one, the new series covering exciting partners from the ADOS ecosystem. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.