 Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Industry Tech Partners Showcase. This is season one, episode one, to kick off a new series covering exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem to talk about accelerating media supply chain volume velocity with AWS. I'm your host John Furrier with theCUBE and today we're excited to be joined by David Rosen, VP of Cloud Applications with Sony Imaging Products and Solutions. David, thanks for joining us today. John, thanks so much for having me. So you guys are doing some pretty cool things in the cloud. You've got a product called CCI, it's labeled C in an I called C, pronounce C. Thanks for clarifying that, it was also good. Media cloud is becoming one of those things that you're seeing a lot of value being developed out on operations, workflows, value creation for old and new content. It's really been interesting to see and with the surge of machine learning, there's now headroom for all the assets, which is data. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing with the C platform that you developed at Sony. Absolutely, so you're spot on, the explosion of content is sort of never been seen before at this level. And it's really one of the things that we're trying to help customers deal with Sony's C media cloud. So at a high level, it provides asset management capabilities, collaboration capabilities, the ability to store, manage and tear your content, leveraging AWS, obviously on the back end of everything that we do. And we really span the entire media life cycle. So customers can use C either for upfront, production, post-production, or leverage it for downstream distribution or everything in between. So yeah, excited to have a conversation with you and get into some of the details. Yeah, so one of the best things about the cloud is the API first. We saw the DevOps movement with software development. Obviously that has gone amazing over the past decade. Now, if you think about media creators, they are kind of developers, they're developing a product that's called media. And so you've got to make up now of the kind of, I wouldn't say old school, but the power law, the classic head of the long tail, the large scale content producers. Now you've got content creators emerging. So you start to see those long tail players move up with large audiences, building these new kinds of franchise, new kinds of digital. What's the landscape look like from a customer standpoint for you guys? As you look out in the marketplace, because obviously the big players are out there. They have huge issues that could be transformed. Then you got new opportunities. How do you look at those? So the interesting thing is that whether you are one of those young and up and coming content creators who is building a presence on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, other places, or you're the largest media entertainment companies in the world, right? So the Paramount Globals, the NBC universals, the Sony Pictures, et cetera. You're kind of doing the exact same things. The only difference is scale, right? So one of the things that we think is really important is that we're putting the tools in the hands of those creators early on so that eventually as they grow up to be those larger, small, mid-sized companies, and eventually maybe these large enterprises, that they've been using the same tools for all that time, they're familiar with it and they kind of grow naturally from a scale perspective, from a really small, sort of independent to a much larger organization. But we are seeing interesting trends where those individual creators are coming to us with the same needs that the larger companies are having. So originally they'd be like we're doing right here. We're sitting in our studios and we're creating content. I'm using my webcam right now and they're gonna post that to YouTube or something else. And that works really well. They get a following, but eventually they're doing this every day, creating lots of content that's sort of like, well, what do I do with all this content? I just filled up my laptop. Well, now we've got tools, right? You can begin archiving that content in AWS. C enables that really simply. We let you collaborate with people. We're in different places right now and we need to be working together. C does some similar things where you can comment and annotate and allow these small creators and these smaller teams that maybe you're remotely distributed to be working together as if they're in the same room. So there's some interesting trends, but I think that the key takeaway is that we want to make sure that we're providing tools that are catering to the largest media enterprises in the world, all the way down to the individual creators. Yeah, I think that's really key. I think you mentioned that scale piece. That brings the cloud in, but also your core competency is serving those creators, connecting teams and content devices together from the front end all the way to the back end with the cloud. Take us through the relationship now with the media cloud that you guys have because you got creators, it could be one, two, three people or a large team of people working and collaborating together. You got collaboration. You got devices to broadcast to. There's now a mix between the two. Take us through that life cycle. Where does ADS help? What are you guys doing? Obviously I'm sure APIs are involved. I'm sure there's a reduction of staff needed as you automate, but that's going to move that to creative front end as people move that heavy lifting that they don't want to do. Take us through the end to end relationship between cloud and Sony. How does that all work out? All right, so it's a great question. I love answering this one because we've been working together with AWS for 10 years now. Literally it's our 10 year anniversary, I think in a couple of months of when we actually launched C Media Cloud. And we go back even before then where we were sitting in conference rooms directly with AWS Solution Architects, telling them about this crazy vision we had 10 years ago about bringing content creation and collaboration and distribution to the cloud. We've done a lot of this stuff on-prem before and we thought we knew what we were doing, but believe me when we learned everything that AWS had to offer, we realized really quickly that we needed help to ensure that what we were going to build for the long-term was going to meet the needs of again everybody from the smallest creators to the largest media enterprises in the world. So we've been working very closely with them, just to make sure we're all on the same page. Everything that C is built on top of AWS. So all of the storage, all of the media processing that we're doing, we've integrated really deeply with other services like Media Live and Amazon Recognition, Amazon Transcribe. Our intention is to allow content owners and content creators to leverage those fantastic technologies as simply as possible, right? So think of Scene Media Cloud as a media-focused layer that sits on top of AWS. So our intention again is to allow people to take advantage of all of the really cool and powerful functionality, not just functionality, but also security that AWS has to offer in a SaaS service. Great stuff on the differentiation side. How do you guys see that on your workflows? Is it the workflows on your side? Is it that's being differentiated? What's the product uniqueness with the cloud that wouldn't have been there? I mean, obviously the agility is their key. I see the agility. What's some of the advantages that you're seeing can come out of the relationship? Is it the workflows? Is it speed? What's the advantage? You know, I can't point to any one because it's sort of is every single advantage. If you take a look at media creation today, take a major motion picture, there are literally thousands of people working on that and they are in hundreds of different locations. Historically, in order to get any of that done, and we're just talking about creation at this point, we're not even talking about distribution, you have content that is literally being copied onto hard drive and shipped via FedEx or UPS or some other method. You know, having to go through customs, sometimes getting caught up in customs, nothing but time is getting lost in those situations. Today, that content can be uploaded directly from cameras on set or near set if they don't have the bandwidth. Directly into seeing out everybody that should have access to that content has access to it through an incredibly simple user interface that they can even access on their phone. So I think the major advantage is enabling people anywhere to be accessing the content in near real time. That is a massive game changer when it comes to speed and agility. You know, I love the commentary around the enterprise, functionality, high end, motion pictures, studios, to the departments and the creators. It's really kind of like democratization, but you can turn it up if you need it. And this whole hybrid work thing is actually applies even more to media because you can have more creative touches and with the content versus having a centralized location. I mean, it just kind of changes the game. Is that something that you see evolving quickly out of this? Absolutely, and the good thing is that we're seeing a lot of the traditional players in the industry jump on board, right? So for the longest time, there was this fantastic ability to leverage the cloud, but the solutions that creatives needed to use weren't quite there yet. They were still in their journey to the cloud. The major players now have moved significantly and substantially into the cloud. So, you know, there was a fantastic discussion at the recent HPA session, Hollywood Professionals Association, where Amazon Studios actually talked about how a very large original production did every part of the movie production process, a post-production process in AWS for beginning to end. And they literally broke down any barriers or preconceived notions that these things could not be done. They broke those right down and they showed how it absolutely can be done. So to answer your question, we're now at a place where we've had the infrastructure and the capability for a very long time with AWS. Now we've got the application layer on top of that and people can begin doing the same work they were doing before, only now doing it significantly more efficiently. And the fun part is from anywhere. You know, David, when I have these conversations with media, because we love media at theCUBE here as well, you know that. We're small, we're small niche B2B enterprise, but you're talking about large movies. Now you're getting back to the creative process. It kind of reminds me of the entrepreneurial side of filmmaking and media. There's a renaissance merging. You're seeing the stars come out of YouTube and TikTok whatnot, they get a lot of audience numbers. You're seeing kind of a new entrepreneurial creation of media. This is enabled by the clouds, enabled by what you guys do. Do you guys see it that way? Do you guys sometimes zoom out and go, wait a minute, a whole nother game being developed on top of the existing media landscape? What's your vision on this whole landscape of the next new artists and the next new creators? Well, I mean, I think it's really clear that we're seeing that transition from individual content creators becoming brands in and of themselves, right? There are hundreds of examples of these folks that started out on one of these channels like YouTube. And the next thing that you know, they have major motion pictures or some of them are talking about buying major social media platforms. So there's no question that they're having a massive impact not only in sort of the change in the talent pipeline but the influence that they're having on the major media organizations. And that's why it's Sony, we think it is absolutely key to embrace them early on, not wait for them to matriculate up to become one of the major enterprises but work with them now and give them the tools that they need to be successful, right? So that's really one of the things that we try to do with C Media Cloud is build an application that literally anybody can sign up for and begin using without any training without any specialized media understanding. That's quite honestly, a lot of these new talent, they're not trained in media production. I mean, they've got a webcam, right? And they bought a microphone from Amazon and they just got started. So we have to put tools into their hands that are as easy to use as the tools that they would use to send email or nobody sends email anymore, I guess, but text or chat or anything else. It's interesting, they're going to just jump running with their brilliance and just not have to learn all the things that are just have to be stand up as scaffolding for getting started. It's so good. Talk about the C platform value proposition and how people get involved. Like if I want to jump in and use the Sony C Media Cloud, what do I do? Do I log into a dashboard? Do I download it from the marketplace? How, and what's the target makeup for the customer? I'm sure you had mentioned the large studios, but how do people engage with it? How do they use the product? What's the consumption pattern look like? You bet. So we really cater to both ends of the market. So obviously large enterprises, you know, we've got the largest media organizations in the world and the largest sports organizations in the world using C, but we also have a self-service plans where anybody can just go to cmediacloud.com and they can buy a plan for $15 a month and they can get started. They can take that same plan and they can grow to be as large as any of these other folks as far as the amount of content that they're working with. So very easy to get started. You can enter your credit card and be working with C today. And in fact, John, I encourage you and theCUBE to begin doing that after this call. We will definitely put the credit card down, swipe and get in there. That's the value pressure of the cloud. This is why I love cloud-native media because the barriers to get started are low. And if you're successful, you can quickly move to scale up capabilities whether that's distributed teams, whatever. This is like software development, but it's media. It's really amazing. I think this is, you're onto something really big here. What's the pricing? You mentioned $15 a month, that's the entry plan. What's the scope of the engagements cost structures the same as cloud buys you go? Kind of variable-based pricing. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, our intention is very much in line with what I would say most kind of pays you go variable-based pricing models are. The intention is we don't want to put a big upfront expenditure down where we need to go through long procurement processes with people. We want them to begin using this and just pay for what they're using in any given month. So we don't lock people into long contracts. They can pay month to month. And if they want to stop using us next month, that's perfectly fine with us. We hope that doesn't happen. But again, it's easy to get in, easy to get out. And we have a very unique racing model. Literally, I think this is unlike anybody else that's out there right now. In that we don't charge per users. Every other platform that we're familiar with out there is charging per user. And that becomes difficult when you scale, right? Because now you have to think and make a decision. Well, as the ROI there for me to let this other group use this tool, as opposed to just letting them use the tool and finding out whether or not it's providing the appropriate value for them. So our pricing model is really just based on three things. One is transfer. So we have a general subscription that you have. And it comes with a certain amount of usage. But then any transfer that you do over and above what is in your plan is charged. And then the third one is storage. And the nice thing is that we allow anybody to use their own AWS account. So we can just point directly to the storage that you already have. So if you have a fantastic deal with AWS, then you should absolutely leverage that. And we encourage people to do it. But that's it. It's as simple as that. You pay for what you use. That's a great model. And if your Amazon customers are out there, they just connect to their account. Awesome. Final question for you is, what's the relationship with AWS? Talk about how they're helping you. Obviously, they have their partner network, which is strong. You're building a stack on top of AWS, which is great. They have all the CapEx. You can leverage that pricing model on the market, which is great. What's been the relationship? How's the partner network? What's it like to work with AWS and share some commentary there? Yeah. So AWS is much more than a service provider for us, right? Or an infrastructure provider. They truly are, in the real sense of the word, a true partner. They are investing in the success of our business on a daily basis. So as you mentioned, we're part of the Amazon partner network. And along with that comes not only a lot of guidance around best practices and how we can be more successful and how we can make sure we're explaining the value proposition to customers, et cetera. So they certainly provide that, but they also help us with respect to go to market motion and they've got AWS Marketplace, which is a fantastic opportunity because it allows customers to take advantage of various partner services and their significant advantages to those customers and being able to leverage their overall enterprise deals with AWS. That's something that we are currently onboarding in the process of onboarding too. So customers will be able to purchase C directly through Marketplace, hopefully here in the next few months. But I can't speak highly enough, not only of the company of AWS for the investment that they're making with us, but the quality of the individuals all the way from the partner development managers to the solution architects that are dedicated to our account to make sure we're up to speed on what the latest and the greatest is and ensuring that we're able to bring the latest innovations to our customers. So really fantastic partners all the way around. It's a great example of letting you guys do what you do great, letting them scale up, you guys take advantage of that, ride that CapEx wave and the technology innovation. Final closing question, close us out. What's going on Sony on your world? What are you investing in? What's going on with your opportunity? How things go and give us an update, put a plug in what's happening. Okay, I love this part. So we're doing some really exciting things. See, like I said, it's been around for 10 years, but Sony has just recently launched something called a Sony Creators Cloud. And this is really our intention to bring the power of our cameras and our devices together very closely with the power of the cloud. So now C is one application that is going to be available to anybody that wants to leverage Sony cameras or even just leverage the cloud for other storage and other capabilities. But we're layering in a different applications that will be available to creators of all shapes and sizes. And so we're really excited about that investment and we feel strongly that there's no company, really no other company in the world that has both the expertise in camera manufacturing and what creators need to use in order to create their content to gather with the expertise around cloud and how to manage content and collaborate with others. So we're really excited to bring that to people this year. Well, you just gave us a little big teaser because we know what happens with cloud. You got the edge, you got IoT cameras. I think I'm connecting the dots here, David. Lot of innovation opportunities happening. Congratulations. Thank you so much. You're part of the season one, episode one inaugural showcase with featuring Amazon web services industry tech partners, the leading ones innovating with the cloud and expanding their mission here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.