 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Welcome back to NAB. Good afternoon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live at day three of NAB. Happy to introduce you to our next guest, Shalindra Mathur, the VP of Architecture at Avid. Shalindra, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. You were telling me off camera that this is your eighth or ninth NAB. I loved it before we kind of dig into Avid and what you're doing. Just get your perspective on the incredible transformation you've probably seen in those eight years. What are some of the things that stand out to you that maybe seemed like a fad seven or eight years ago that you've seen that are now absolutely well-established and critical to the media and entertainment industry? Well, you know what, one thing I'll comment on right away is something I've been commenting to other folks who haven't been here that long. When we used to come to NAB some time ago, outside in the parking lot would be all these trucks. There'd be all these helicopters, right? That's how news broadcasts, this was done. The parking lot is empty. That's not where things are. They're drones in here, in cages, right? I mean, that's the new way, the digital age, as well as the new technologies have evolved that the way we collect news and the way we actually capture news is actually changing quite a bit. So that equipment is changing quite a bit. Yes, yes. So you spoke at the virtual NAB conference last month on cloud transition patterns for media enterprises. Tech trends, what are some of the things that you're seeing? What did you share in that conference? So the biggest tech trend I think we're seeing is the move to cloud computing. Cloud has been around for a while. We've all been used to it, whether we're using Dropbox or any other mechanism of exchanging content. What's happening is that it's now being adopted by the media industry a lot more. And again, what we knew as server-based computing, you had machine rooms where servers were being created, were being hosted. There was dedicated connectivity between them. A lot of that is now moving to network and it's the compute storage. All of that is slowly moving over to the cloud. And the cloud providers are actually making it very possible to do so. So a lot of what I was talking about at the VNAB conference was how some of these broadcasters who are faced with these new challenges and to get more efficient, to have geographically distributed productions, what patterns they can actually adopt to ease their transition to the cloud. So just as an example, in the cloud, there's a efficiency of doing something called serverless computing, microservices. But then there's a lot of IP, a lot of server-based compute that has been built up. So there is a transition pattern still of going from machine room to data centers. That's a central localization and just using virtualization technologies, going from data centers now to the public cloud. And in fact, even doing it in such a way that you're connected in all three environments so that if you wanted to transition over, you can actually connect all these three environments. So that was the main purpose of the talk and I was talking about some of the implementations that we have done as well with an Avid that actually eases that transition so that you can host your server processes, your how actually editing clients are working across. We've actually done a lot of implementations. I was explaining how that transition can be possible for not just broadcasters but filmmakers and also audio artists. Yeah, I wanted to talk about audio. We've been talking a lot about film, the major studios at the conference this week, news, broadcast news, streaming services. But you guys do a lot with audio and music production. What are some of the biggest pain points that you see in music production that can really be alleviated by moving to cloud computing? So artists are artists everywhere. You will find artists, you don't want to be restricted by geography in finding the person you want to collaborate with. What does cloud provide? That one centralized location where you can exchange information, exchange your creativity. So this is one of the areas where we focused on, so we have Pro Tools as our primary audio DAW and what we enabled was having two artists collaborate with each other even by sharing tracks. So you could have somebody doing a guitar riff somewhere, a drummer somewhere, a singer somewhere and you're collaborating on these tracks and we're using the cloud to exchange a lot of this information back and forth. You can message each other, hey, I need this piece of work done. They record it, you integrate it back. So that was a perfect example of cloud collaboration and this is aimed at the aspiring musicians who can collaborate as well as professionals. So look, thinking maybe of the professionals and music production company, what does their transition, as the VP of architecture, I imagine you speak with a lot of customers who are probably quite influential in what Abbott's doing from a design and R&D perspective. What is a music production company's transition to production in the cloud look like? What are the, I don't want to say hurdles, but what are maybe the steps in that journey to get to cloud? Is it a destination hybrid? Is it a journey through hybrid to public? So that's what, so some of the current restrictions, I'll call it, will slowly disappear but the fact is when you're interacting as an artist with a surface controller, a mixer, that's tactile information, that's right there. However, what doesn't need to happen is that the computations that happen behind it doesn't have to be right here. With network connectivity, you can start moving that away from the control that you have over what you're creating, your mixers. So this is where some of the compute is moving away. Now, you have to take, especially in audio latency is very important, like low latency, so low latency networks have to be there. On the video side, in fact we're showing video editing being done directly on the cloud. With VDI technology, which is virtual display technology, improving so rapidly now, we are actually able to do editing directly while instead of having a workstation on-premises, you actually have it running on the cloud. So those are examples which are hurdles but they're not really hurdles. That's just creative choices. You need to have your color correction surface control here but slowly those are the ones that are moving to the centralized data center all the way to the cloud and now even some of the display aspects where you needed everything to be local, that's also moving. So things like GPU-based compute that's appearing on a lot of the cloud providers that's allowing your cloud back end to drive your displays now remotely. Last question for you before we wrap up here. I'd love to understand how Abbott is involved from a technology perspective to help broadcast news, for example, assemble a story and get it out in real time 24 by seven. In contrast to a few years ago here at NAB when the parking lot was full of trucks with satellite towers, how are you helping to assemble the story with technology? Well, so news is changing, right? It's news is changing, it's coming in rapidly. A lot of the news sources are in fact, sometimes social feeds. I'll confess, some of my news in the morning is not by the newspaper, I'm checking my Facebook. Yeah, Twitter. And that's where I'm getting, or Twitter and that's where I'm getting my news. Absolutely. It's mixed in with my own personal news as well as news is news. So collecting that information that's become a very important source of information. Of course, storytelling as a journalist doesn't get replaced. You still need the skills of making sure that you can craft it all together. So that's where assembling it, telling that story through an editorial process but treating just the social media feed as an input to the whole process of collecting this information. This is one change that's happening. But of course, it's not just social media as a source but it's also destination. That's another big change. So you're not just publishing out your story to a news outlet, you can tweet it out. So these are all changes that are happening and these are all, you asked about how are some of the customers influencing it. We just had the AvidConnect event and one of the things that we find really good about the AvidConnect event, these are our customers telling us how they're changing. This how we're collecting input and reacting to it and changing what we need to do to serve them. Excellent. Well, I'm curious what you'll see in the next eight years of NAB Schillender. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Well, thank you very much Lisa. And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, we're live at NAB 2017 on day three. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, we'll be right back.