 Everyone, welcome to this Cube's presentation of the AWS Industry Tech Partners Showcase. This is season one, episode two of our ongoing series covering the exciting partners from the Ados ecosystem. Talk about enabling global collaboration and game development. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. And here we're excited to be joined by Brad Hart, who's the CTO of Digital Creation at Perforce. Brad, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me, John. You know, it's really interesting, the market's changing significantly, enabling global collaboration and game development, a big part of what you do. The gaming industry is also evolving rapidly as well. The rise of virtual production, AI, other innovative technologies. The workflows and development environments are expanding at an extraordinary pace. You guys are at the center of this. So what is going on? Tell us, take us through kind of the techniques, technologies and production, AI. How do you guys see this? What do you guys see in the marketplace right now? What's the big market force? Yeah, I think there's a number of factors here. So really the scale of the products that are being created, whether they be the video games or using game engine technology to make TV series, the newest generation of movies, the quality went from low definition to high definition, 4K, 8K, that is a massive proliferation of assets, not only the number of assets, but the size of these assets. People are making modern day games, they're not dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of files, they're dealing with millions of files that's a combination of source code, digital assets, massive size of files, terabytes, petabytes of data, thousands of users all across the globe trying to collaborate together in an efficient way. Again, efficiency is so important because deadlines never get longer, they always get shorter, right? So trying to manage this kind of scale is ever complex. And that's really the heart of what Perforce's Helix Core does is enable teams to work at this level of scale. The games are getting more complex, the reuse is really important. So transmedia strategies, I might make a game, that game might be then the assets in that game might be used for marketing, which then might become a TV show or a movie and it works in the reverse. You don't have to recreate those assets and those characters, you can reuse those in those different media types. So being able to have the traceability, the security around that, and to do that at scale is very, very, very important. This is an exploding environment. I mean, you talk about things, this is mind-blowing right there, you think about what the old way things were, you build an asset, you ship it and it's done, okay, it goes on reruns or it gets some distribution. You just mentioned a couple of things that's really hot right now in the market, repurposing reuse, huge dynamic asset management placed into that, rights, royalty, I mean, security. And now you've got generative AI coming in too. The creator culture is booming. The distributed nature and dynamic power dynamics of how to build the assets are coming into the play. It's kind of like a perfect storm for kind of a change over in the market. How do you see that, what's your reaction to that and what would you say to that? Yeah, totally aligned. One of the other things from a data point perspective of a shift in the industry tied to that is traditionally games, your staffing would be about one developer to one digital artist, creator. And that has shifted to, it's now really three designers and artists to one coder, trending very quickly to five artist designers to one coder. So the amount of assets, the need to create, that's where the generative AI comes in, that's where this massive staffing of these artists and designers, it's just constant content creation, this proliferation because that's what touches the end users. So being able to manage that, be able to do it at scale in every large gaming company and every small gaming company I talked to tells me the same thing. We don't have enough resources, we don't have enough talent, whether they can't hire them and find them or they don't have the budget to do it, but they're still under the deadlines to ship their product on time, whether it be before Christmas or whatever, and it doesn't end there. Once you ship, you've got patches, updates, enhanced content packs, et cetera, that constantly roll out throughout the course of the year, you need to be able to keep up with that content. So there's two things that help, you have to make the team that you do have as efficient as possible. So their workflows, their ability to reuse content that's already been created that they own, maybe it was a soccer game had proud noise that I want to reuse in my NFL game. It's going to sound the same. I don't want to re-spend the time to recreate it. I need a tool like what we do with our Helix Dam product, which allows you to catalog all of your assets and reuse them across teams to save you time to hit the ground faster. So you're always working on unique new content to get your production out quicker. I love the Helix messaging there. It's a good feature that's really in line with the trends. You mentioned more artists, less tech people. In the old days you had the creators and you had the tech operators and nerds that would operate everything. Now you lower the barriers. Actually you have more democratization on the creation side that doesn't require the technology. And so you're going to see a lot of change over in the team configuration. So I have to ask you, which is a great point you just mentioned. I got to ask you, with that being said, what kind of pressure does this put on the tech stack and the traditional workflows? Because now you got cloud scale. You have on-premise storage as well. It could be on your iPhone, it could be on the device. It could be in a server, but the cloud also plays at the place. So you have a tech stack dynamic. What's the pressure point on the tech stack? What changes? Yeah, so I mean, I think really a couple of avenues there. One is it's around the scale, right? So you need to be able to support this massive number of large assets and support the collaboration of multiple people can be thousands of people working on the same project all across the globe and not assuming they're all working close to a data center. That's where the cloud comes into play. We see a lot of larger customers adopt a hybrid strategy where there are leveraging cloud technology and then using distributed replication to their local hubs at their corporations to get that performance that they need. So that's one of the things that we allow them to do is to sort of federate out that data model and the distribution. The other thing is you need to have a single source of truth. And this is where a lot of companies are struggling right now. If your artists are using one method to pseudo version control their assets and every group is using a different tool or methodology, some are using SharePoint, some are using simple file sharing services and some are using version control for their source code and some of the other assets, you don't have a single source of truth. You need one single source of truth, something that controls the security, the access, the traceability and will allow you to have consistent creation of your builds, your renders so that you can iterate quickly. You don't have leaks. You reduce the amount of regressions and defects that you have. So you really need tools and environments, not just, we love to talk obviously about the version control, the HEOS Core and the HEOS Dam, but the infrastructure needs to have that underneath that foundation, the plumbing has to scale. And that's where we do look to work with a lot of the cloud providers to help us scale accordingly. Talk about Perforce's role in the equation now. You mentioned a lot of things that are going on in the market and the challenges for the environment and the customers. Teams are changing, the scale's a huge issue, cloud's there to help, I get that. Now, C AWS is a big cloud for that. But if I'm a customer, I'm a builder, I'm building a game and I'm involved, I want to take advantage of being adaptable and agile and innovative, take an advantage of talent, whether I'm reusing someone else's stuff or building and reusing over there too. What's your role in enabling that? Can you take us through how you guys do that? I like the single source of truth, is that a platform? Take us through the Perforce's role. Yeah, so ultimately HEOS Core is the foundational product of Perforce and that's the version control product. And really at the end of the day, what that does is we store all of the data, all of the content that people are collaborating on and we manage the flow of change. So one of the things that HEELX Core allows you to do is with our stream capability, you could actually visually define your development workflow, your staging, you can model the maturity of the game as it progresses. You can manage patch releases, you can manage customer betas, you could do all of this visually and where that's really important. In the old days, people would use scripts and whiteboards to talk about their branching strategy and that is error prone and very cumbersome. By doing this graphically, we're allowing you to customize the process, but we can help you enforce that process. And what's nice is because it's built into the tool itself, I could be in India, I could be in the UK, I could be in California or Boston and I'm gonna follow the same set of rules because we're all looking at the same single pane of glass on how the process works. So now we're allowing people to store this massive amount of data, where the only company in the world that can do that can handle this transactional volume, millions, billions of transactions a year, petabytes of data, millions of files on a project and allow the coordination, because it's one thing to store all the data, but it's another thing to coordinate the efforts of thousands of people. Now what's really unique is even small teams need this level of scale. If I'm a team of five, I'm an indie studio getting started on the side, I am still dealing with a lot of files and big files. So they still need the power of Helix Core and that's why we're building products to allow them to be cloud-enabled, to get up and running very quickly, to sort of lower the barrier to entry to the enterprise products we have. And then like I said, we mentioned earlier that Helix Dam product, that's all about it's designed for artists and designers. How do you version your work in a very designer friendly way? How do you share, tag, catalog, use AI to tag your resources and images and video files and 3D effects renders and then share them across the team and build the workflow and approval. So you gotta be able to adapt quickly. You gotta be able to handle massive amounts of volume, massive amounts of people working on it and you have to have an adaptable process that fits that team and that team's needs at that point in their development life cycle. I mean, it's really an awesome conversation because you've got gaming, you've got media as well are converging with software development practices. This is like cloud native 101, version control, code management, asset management, scalability, you know, workspaces, how do people work together? All these things they do in branching, it sounds like it's a development project, CI CD pipeline and kind of thing going on here. So this is the reality that's going on here. And like you said, AI is coming around the corner. You said the ratio is changing from tech to creatives. Do you envision that continually to be the same? What's your prediction? Because if you have the scalability and the platform that does a lot of integration and development tooling, all the picks and shovels are there for the creative, which could be a bigger team. How do you see- Oh absolutely, yeah. And I think one of the part of that is one of the trends that I'm seeing is the, just like you hit on a perfect, just like the trends in software development shift left of testing CI CD, those methodologies are now making their way into the digital asset creation workflow where there traditionally wasn't a whole lot of rigorous version control concept of CI. Now they're just the words are different, right? Instead of CI CD, we're talking render pipelines, right? So the words are a little different, but the best practices are the same and they're moving into that industry, that part of the industry. So these teams can get the rigor they need to collaborate at scale, maintain the security, security around IP is so critical. And so the sort of the haphazard methodologies for collaborating, they don't work anymore because they're not secure. So putting this into a system like Heel of Score that has the granular security that you need and traceability, you can lock your assets in a protected mode, but then enable enhanced collaboration. Again, it just allows people to go faster but to do it the right way. But yeah, you hit it right on the head. These best practices are moving into this industry and the best practices and all the technologies from gaming is now going into movie and television production. Same technique, you know, real-time engines, AI, that's all now shifting into those industries. And it's the same talent pool. The same people are working on the same kinds of projects. One just happens to be, you know, the final output of movie, the other ones again. Yeah, I mean, the outcome, again, semantics, right? Workflows, tools, you can say whatever you apply that. But I think the key thing is at scale. I think the scale piece you mentioned early on is key because with cloud native scale, you can introduce more services. And then so you have more tooling or more say data access you mentioned tracing. What about observability? How do you manage all aspects of the underlying plumbing that is abstracted away for the, in this case, the developer or creative? I mean, I can see this going in many different directions. I mean, what's your reaction? Cause you got the Unreal engine out there. You got Unity. These are tools out there and platforms. There's going to be more coming in with AI. With generative AI, you're seeing things now that are going to be generated on behalf of existing data. Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. All it's going to do is create more content that needs to be managed and controlled and secured. And that's a good problem for us. Cause that's where we play. But there's no question that's going to massively increase the amount of data with the generative AI. And we're already seeing people there. They're crawling with the generative AI used in games and movies because there's concern around IP. Where was this thing trained on? Once that gets fixed, it's going to explode. But where people are using it today is for storyboarding and prototyping, right? Really quick, fast, AI is going crazy now for helping people iterate quickly to get to sort of the final story, the final design layout, and then their team can go ahead and create. So you got to really quickly get to that visualization to get the producers and directors to buy off on the vision, whether it's a game or a movie or a show. And the AI is just creating massive amounts of content. It's proliferating the data and it's all going to be managed. And then working with the cloud providers, there's so many services they have that are at unlimited scale, which is great. And our goal is to abstract the coders and the designers from even thinking about any of that plumbing. It just works, right? It scales as they need it to scale. And that's really why we, leveraging the cloud data technology is pretty critical for us. I think that's a great point and as we kind of come to the end here, I want to just get more thoughts on the aspect of abstracting away the complexity, but also enabling more value. And one of the key features you have beside scale is distributed workforce, the huge dynamic, because imagine more people coming into the teams with the creativity from AI, you're going to have more contribution potentially, more potentially third-party content. What's licensable, what's not? How do you handle the IP? What if there's a royalty? All these things are now kind of thorny IP issues, but at the same time, it's also contribution. We've seen this in open source as well. So in software, so it's coming down to a world where, is that something that you're seeing where you're going to have a potential tsunami of a contribution that could be user-generated, open source? How do you guys view that as just another element to the platform? How do you resolve that? Absolutely. So the, you know, like we talked about, the remote workforce is here to stay and it's all about finding the best talent in the world. And a lot of the remote workforce is sitting at their house on their desktop. They're not in a corporate office with the corporate pipe. So getting everybody on the same page in the process flow in a way that's organized and enforced, the way you want it to be enforced is critical. Being able to enable collaboration so that you and I are in different states or in different countries, you want it to feel like we're sitting side-by-side. So the tools that we've built allow people to collaborate real time on the same data and enable us to, you know, reserve our work so that we don't trip over each other, merge our code, you know, merge our work, you know, spread us out into parallel teams and bring all that work back together so we can go faster. The, you know, whether it, we're also seeing a big trend in studios, especially in the VFX world, where they have like a multi-tiered studio approach where you might have the main studio who farms out to multiple vendors who in turn each farm out to multiple vendors. How does that data flow? How do you trace it back, right? That content is coming and flowing up from different companies, third parties. How do you maintain it? How do you control it? How do you give access to just the content that that vendor needs to see without seeing the content from another vendor? There's a lot of concerns around security that we focus on and, but it's just another way for people to go faster to open up the portals of people contributing to their project. That's awesome. Brad, you're the CTO at Perforce. I have to ask you for the folks watching or anyone interested in Perforce and Helix, you know, this exploding environment is a new wave of digital creation coming. You highlighted all the key points. People can be like blown away by, well, I'm scared of the IP issues or, hey, I want to lean into it, be competitive advantage. As this next wave hits, okay, what should people expect to see? How does Perforce address that? What should they know about how to move forward and how you can help them? Yeah, it's great. It's a great question. So, I mean, really this is at the heart of what we do. We play in the space where scale and complexity and managing IP in a secure scalable way matter. So, perforce.com, we have our enhanced studio pack. We can download, you can use our product five users for free in perpetuity to get you. So we have training materials. So people learn how to use some of these real-time engines, do it in a proper way using version control. How do you manage your whole pipeline process? How do you manage an M&E, I mean, an entertainment pipeline and do it properly and share and collaborate with large amounts of folks? So we have tools, we have freemium products that people can get up and running and we're working on cloud initiatives to help people get up and running very quickly, you know, reducing administrative burden, et cetera. So it's, I guess the message to the world is as these waves hit, let us worry about the details of the scale and the complexity. You worry about creating cool stuff. Yeah, that's awesome. Enabling all that value creation, fast speed, high scale, great product, workflows and tools are interchangeable, whether it's software gaming or whatever, studios. New artists are going to emerge out of this next wave. You're going to see talent, new brands, Brad, come out. It's going to be a high velocity environment where at the end of the day, good content just rises right to the top. Absolutely. And you know, it's great for the folks that have those skill sets. They're not just locked into gaming and media and entertainment, right? Digital twins and automotive. They use all the same technology, aerospace, defense. You can take those skill sets and go work in an industry that you're passionate about. Because you're going to need that same great content, whether it's you're working with the marketing team, showing off the next great Ferrari in a digital twin or you're building an next spaceship. You need these same sets of skills. And so it's a really exciting time, I think, for these end users. I saw a company talk on theCUBE. They're building a gaming environment to replicate their production workflows. You mentioned digital twin. Essentially, they're simulating the efficiency of their system like a game. These are game mechanics. Again, the application with AI as this AI wave hits is going to create, and everyone agrees on theCUBE. We talked in the past year as the creative surge in knowledge, workers and creative. So a step function of creativity and talent and product will be hitting the market. So you guys are right there helping them out. Absolutely. Brad, thanks for coming on. Appreciate your time, CTO and of digital creation. Love the title, more contents coming here at Perforce. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Here's part of our season one, episode two of our AWS industry tech partner showcase. Features from the best in the industry, building the bracelets for the next generation cloud and AI and content. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.