 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Industry Tech Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode one, kicking off a new series covering exciting partners from the Amazon Web Services ecosystem, talking about accelerating media supply chain, volume and velocity with AWS. I'm your host, John Furrier here, with our guest, Eric Carson, Chief Revenue Officer at Aliyah Creative Technologies. Eric, thanks for joining us here for the episode one of the startup showcase here, industry showcase, thanks. Yeah, no, thanks for having me, John. I really appreciate it. So we had a great results coming from NAB, National Association of Broadcast. You guys were there, big booth, a lot of media transformation going on in all companies. The pandemic pulled forward this value proposition. You guys are a big leader doing some innovative things. Take a minute to explain what you guys do first. I'd like to go into some questions. Yeah, sure. Atelier is really a company built and focused on cloud native media supply chains. I think there's a couple of things that we do uniquely well that are keeping us front of mind for a lot of the people, both at NAB and our current customer base. One is that we built a system that fully understands that we've got an exploding version problem in the industry. Titles have lots of versions and lots of potential distribution endpoints. And if we start that way in a media supply chain system, then we're prepared for the distribution issues that will come up later and downstream. But the second thing that we did is we said, look, if we have a version issue and we know that there are many different versions being created, then we should prepare customers as they move into the cloud to work with those in as a cost-effective manner as possible. So we built out a proprietary machine learning algorithm called FrameDNA. That allows us to look at every single frame of the incoming versions of a title, identify where there's duplication and consolidate all of that duplication out of the title so that you're only storing the deltas necessary for full fidelity presentation at distribution. That helps our customers cut their costs of storage by 70% or more as they move to the cloud. And I think the last thing that a lot of our customers seem to really enjoy is the fact that there's a no-code environment available to them to define the delivery endpoints. So all of the metadata collection, the media collection, the metadata transformation, the media transcode, the delivery instructions are all in one single package template that's transportable. So our customers can take advantage of previously built delivery endpoints for places like Netflix or HBO Max or Hulu or Disney Plus, and they don't have to rebuild that. We can simply import that onto their platform, configure that, and they're ready to go and make ingest and deliveries in the very first week of operation. It's almost interesting. It's a mindset shift, but also a business shift. It's cloud-native technology. We saw this with DevOps, with developers. You've got machine learning, doing some things that make things better operationally. What's the big difference in cloud-native media versus old school? In terms of the differentiation, the benefits, you mentioned some of the things about storage costs. That's obvious. That's obviously, people see that. What are some of these new cloud-native media things that people are seeing operationally and from a development standpoint, meaning the product that they produce? I mean, what we're hearing is how do we reinforce the business needs as we move to the cloud? And one of the big media business needs is faster time to ROI, right? So how quickly can I get new solutions running and expand my media distribution without having to take months or years to deploy that and make it effective? The Atelier solution was built to be effective in days and weeks, not months and years. I think the other thing, when we talk about cloud-native is we talk about the ability to take advantage of scaling power of cloud infrastructure in a native way. Rather than needing teams of IT engineers to spin up new infrastructure manually or scripting capabilities to spin up heavy VM environments, a cloud-native serverless environment like Atelier's Connect platform gives our customers the ability to auto-scale and run their platform in a very cost-effective manner. Yeah, I think the operations impact is huge. How does Amazon help you guys with this? It's actually all in the cloud with AWS. What do they bring into the table? Yeah, we love our partnership with Amazon. They've been a fantastic partner for us to build both our business on and our technology on. They've provided tools that make it very, very simple for us to build a technology stack, right? It's a very mature tool set. It's an ever-evolving tool set that's respecting the desires and the needs of our media customers. But what AWS has really done well is provide additional tooling to make connections easier. Things like AWS EventBridge that allow us to, in a no-code manner, very quickly, within hours, have full connections up and running between other supply chain partners and build out what used to be very complex months-long projects within weeks now. I love what you guys talk about machine learning and doing those things that matter. D-Tube, no-code, low-code. That's key and that's going to resonate with folks. But let's back up and talk about the supply chain for a second, if you don't mind. Explain what the media supply chain challenges are for your customers and you have, obviously, heavy customers that have been in the business for a long time and new use cases emerging with digital. So you've got kind of two sides of the coin here. You've got efficiency on that transformation from traditional broadcast to digital and then digital-native, digital-first ventures. What does a supply chain mean? I mean, there's two schools of thought. Take us through what that definition is and then what's actually happening with it. Sure, you know, where we look at a media supply chain is we're really looking at the logistics of moving media and transforming that media for use downstream to ultimately serve a consumer or a monetization need, right? So we don't need a complex system to do that, but we do need to abstract away the complexities that are normally in that operation from manual processes to as much automation as possible. So if you think about moving in a legacy operation like some of our studio customers have done, you know, they've got issues that they're trying to solve like aggregating their catalog and giving their sales team visibility to what can they license? In which languages can I make my distribution sales? You know, do we have all of the pieces for me to do this type of deal? So giving them a single title structure that they can quickly look through and say, oh, yes, we have all of those pieces, let's get this deal done, helps accelerate revenue in our studio customer businesses. If you look at a digital first type of customer base, you know, especially some of our media service or aggregation partner vendors, that that's their business as being a managed service vendor. You know, we're talking about the ability to target multiple new end points for them or provide new managed service capabilities because the platform gives them a much lower cost of operation and a much faster way to build and distribute new delivery end points. I mean, it's very clear that the markets could get much more media saturated with more capabilities, having merchandising, capabilities of content, giving people the ability to be agile is what you guys seem to be enabling you. That's awesome. How does it render itself in the customer's environment? What are they doing right now? What's their flex? Do they have to make any adjustments? Do they need to add more people? What's the operationalizing of the solution look like on the customer side for your teams? Oh yeah, this is actually a really great question. And I'd love to bring up some specific examples here on teams and the operations impact. One of my joys in joining Atelier has been that our platform is designed to scale to from a very, very small customer. You know, a customer that's got three or four people running their entire distribution operation to an enterprise media shop like a film studio that's able to throw hundreds of people at their distribution operation or thousands of people worldwide. So we've been able to help customers say, look, what is the impact that you're trying to achieve? And if it's with a small group of people, we can design a system that allows you to serve more distribution with the same number of people. And if you're in a large operation, we start to get into conversations that are more about how can we make these people's lives more effective? You know, a system like ours is designed around just highlighting exceptions in the supply chain workflow. So that the only thing that interrupts their day-to-day, your operator's day-to-day is really just, here's what needs attention. These are the missing media items. These are the blockers that are preventing this job that's due on Friday from actually getting out the door. That's awesome. Can you talk about also how you guys are partnering with other folks in the ecosystem of AWS's network? And I think you guys are available in the marketplace, if I'm not, if I'm... We are, and more than half of our customers do purchase the solution through AWS Marketplace. We see that as a great partnership with AWS. It eases our ability to sell the solution. It also is very attractive for our customers, of course, to help with their spend commits. So, but when we talk about a supply chain, there's usually multiple vendors or multiple types of capabilities needed. And I think the reason Atelier has been successful is we know exactly where our capability starts and where it stops. We know what we do well and we know where we need partners. So things like title metadata, where that needs to be complex and feed a supply chain system, we don't want to be a title management system, but we love working with partners like Fabric and like Vueviquity with their MetaView system. They're fantastic at that. And we have a very easy connection with them across EventBridge to bring title metadata in and let them deal with the complexity of that. Same with contract sales, right? I mean, we can use a great partner like Rightsline. That's their entire business. But we, and then we can bring that deal information and the contract details to drive distribution order creation and fulfill those sales orders. So you guys are doing a lot of integration then with other partners making that easy to use on that end. Is that, you describe it pretty easy to use or what's on the customer side? Yeah, very, very easy to use. A lot of our customers will use AWS Pro Services as part of their project, especially where EventBridge will serve as the backend, the event bus, if you will. Other customers choose other systems and they'll use other systems integrators to help with that. But again, the whole projects that we're involved with are projects that do take literally just weeks. Our big lead time is eight weeks at the far outside. A lot of our customers are running the system within days. Love the cloud native agility. Love the ability to stand stuff up fast. That's kind of what we need. I got to ask you, if I'm sold on this thing, I say, hey, Eric, I'm in. What do I do? How do I engage? Now I know this depends on the answer to that, but how does someone, how does a customer, a prospect become a customer? How do they engage with you? What do they have to do? Can you take us through a use case of an engagement? I sign a contract, I come in. What happens next? Yeah, it's fairly simple. So our environment will spin up a new organization or a new instance for that customer that usually takes less than an hour. And then we'll contact the user management system for that customer and create users. So usually within that first day, users are in the system with roles defined and the system comes out of the box ready to use for ingest, media packaging, transcode and delivery. So that's as hard as it is. A lot of the rest of the configuration will be things like, how do I want to structure any changes to my metadata model? Which specific platforms do I want configured on the platform? Or do I want to create some custom delivery endpoints? And those are usually a few hours at a time and some user training. Who's your target customer? What's their problem look like when they say, I got a call, I got to get on board the cloud native solution. What's their problem? What does it look like? What pain do they feel? What do they need? Can you take us through some of those qualifications if someone's watching right now? Yeah, so I think one of the big pain points that we get involved with on some very large deal basis is this pain of deduplication. I want to move my studio archives. I want to move my license archives into the cloud. But I've done the math and that's a really expensive operation for me. Help me move my media into the cloud at a lower cost, right? And that's where our frame DNA technology can really, really help. But we get also a very common use case that is around help me simplify packaging and distribution operations. I run my entire packaging operation off of spreadsheets and manual work orders and assignments. I don't have a good way to track that. I don't know what's missing deliveries get out sometimes by the skin of our teeth. We get lucky more than we're great. I think the big major third pain point that our customers face and that we hear about a lot is my sales team, my licensing team doesn't know what we have to sell. They know the title names, but they're doing deals more and more in international or a compliance edit locations. And they need to know of my 327 different options, which of those are available for a specific title. And so bringing a catalog aggregation into a supply chain like connect offers, right? By having that native catalog capability helps solve that sales pain. So you get the lift and shift, you got the merchandising of the content, multiple channels and points. That's going to be very key. I think that's probably will be a growth area. Don't just see that emerging as one of the hot areas because you think about the different channels, the different kind of packages, promotional to subscription. Is that something you guys see happening as a big wave? And we're seeing on the, at least on the digital side, at least more channels to push to more environments, more targeted audiences everywhere and all over the world. What do you see, what's your take on that? Yeah. And long-tail monetization continues to be the name of the game, you know, to unlocking the value of some of these larger archives around the world. So that does mean more distribution endpoints. And they're only cost effective if I can package and deliver them in a cost effective way, right? I can't afford to pay hundreds of dollars per title if my monetization on the other end is only, you know, $10. So, you know, having something that lowers my cost of packaging and distribution down to that cost of a sandwich really helps me get to a, I now see how we can make money there. Yeah, awesome. Eric, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate final word. Give a quick plug on some of the benefits around the analytics and the ROI and then what you guys are up to as a company. Sure. So we did roll out a new analytics capability at NAB. It allows our customers to forecast their usage and trends, gives us some great insights as to how the customers are using the system. But most importantly, it sets us up towards doing things like cost projections. So our customers can start making better decisions on which pieces of the system to use, which ones are being underutilized or overutilized. And I think anything that helps our customers be more effective is really where we want to be as a company. Love the D-dupe. Love the reducing storage costs. Love that efficiency. Love the headroom for future development and sales. Great stuff. Eric, thanks for coming on. Episode one, season one of this showcase. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, John. Eric Carson, Chief Revenue Officer at Talir. Creative Technologies, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching season one, episode one, kicking off a new series, covering the exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem. Thanks for watching.