 Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Industry Tech Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode two, kicking off our exciting series covering partners from the AWS ecosystem. We're gonna be talking about enabling global collaboration in game development. And your host, Lisa Martin. Pleased to welcome Laura Teodosio, CEO of Arch Platform Technologies to the program. Laura's here to talk about game development infrastructure in the cloud. Laura, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks for having us. Tell the audience a little bit about Arch Platform Technologies. Give us your mission, your vision. Great. Arch is a company that helps other companies move their creative workloads to the cloud. So a lot of workloads such as visual effects, animation, game development, virtual production, we make it really easy to work, move those workloads to the cloud and run them efficiently for cost savings and other sorts of efficiencies that you can get by running in the cloud. So you launched in 2019 just four short years ago. What was the catalyst to launch the business? What gaps in the market did you see at the time? Right before that launch, two people at the company decided that they wanted to build a visual effects studio entirely in the cloud and it hadn't really been done before. So they got together and they built the first VFX that we know of VFX Studio in the cloud on AWS. And we basically leveraged that idea and realized that we could extend it to all sorts of creative workloads in the cloud, whether that be editorial, virtual production, game development, engineering, et cetera. And that's where we are. And we have had wild success in doing that because we make it really easy to build those facilities in the cloud on top of AWS. Wild success, I love that. We're going to get into that in this conversation. Give us a little bit of a double click on the actual platform and what it's enabling organizations to achieve. So it's essentially a control plan that sits on top of AWS. And it makes it really easy to use AWS. So it's a SaaS dashboard and it fronts an orchestration engine and a machine image pipeline, which allows customers to build these facilities in the cloud and AWS. So everything from VPCs to networking, to connection manager and broker, storage, build farms, render, workstations with all the software tools on it. And we can spin up those facilities in 45 minutes. And it's all done through code. So it's repeatable. It's auditable. There's nothing that's custom or hand built. And so we make it really easy to do this. And then additionally for the workstations, we have a machine image pipeline, which allows us to put all the tools and services that customers like and are already using on the workstations and in the facility. Talk a little bit about your target audience. Who's using the platform? So our customers are varied. And the thing they have in common is that they're all collaborating in some sort of creative endeavor. So we support studios, broadcasters, game development companies, engineering companies, government contractors. And the thing that they all have in common is they're doing some collaborative creative workflow, whether that be game development, editing in the cloud, visual effects, putting on a virtual production. That's the similarity between all of them. And they include companies from 20 people to some of the largest enterprise companies in the world. Talk about, so a wide variety of companies and those folks leveraging the technologies. You talked about that speed to market, 45 minutes, amazing, the ease of use. What, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the major challenges that they're coming to you and are saying, guys, help us fix this? Yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly there's the challenge of being able to find global talent. That's one of the challenges and one of the reasons, there are many reasons that people move through the cloud, but what we've been seeing and what we've been hearing from a lot of customers is talent is hard to find for these very skilled jobs that are needed, particularly in game development. So one of the things they want to be able to do is go around the world to find their talent, but keep all of their infrastructure consistent, right? And they want to be able to make sure that no matter where people are working, they're working in a facility that has all of the tools and all of the data that their teams are going to need. And so Arch helps them do that by building these connected facilities all around the world on top of AWS data centers. So they get that consistent experience and help with the skills gap. Sharon with us, Laura, why the decision to build on top of AWS as a partner? AWS basically has some of the widest reach in terms of data centers, right? And just as we were talking about, our customers are all over the world and they want to be able to deploy all over the world. And AWS makes it really easy to do that. And additionally, the breadth of services that AWS provides has allowed us to build very complex and robust solution. So really, in looking at the cloud providers, AWS has really been a very good partner for us in terms of the ability for us to build what we needed to build. Sounds like it was the absolute right kind of synergistic partner. It was a little bit, go ahead. AWS continues to be a very good partner for us just in terms of support and visibility. So we have a very good working relationship with AWS. That's excellent. And that goes a long way towards employee experience, customer experience. Talk a little bit about besides game development, where else are game companies using the cloud? Give us kind of your perspective across the industry. Yeah, I mean, most of our customers to date in the game industry have been on game development, but we're now currently working with a AAA studio to really test game play testing. So that's when they do a build of a game and they want 100 people to get on there and test it, to see how it's performing, to see what changes need to be made. So working with a studio using our orchestration engine and machine image pipeline to very quickly spin up hundreds of workstations. They get their game testers on there, they test, and then those workstations can be destroyed or spun down so that they save money. So the next time they have a new build, they want to do this, they spin this up again. So it's a new use case for us, and we're really excited to see how this goes. You talked about wild success earlier. Share a customer story that you think really shines the spotlight on the value that Arch is delivering to its customers. Oh, there's many different customers to talk about in different ways. So, we're certainly working with game development companies who have facilities around the world that we have connected together. And in one particular case, they're working out of Europe and they're working out of North America. And so everybody's in sync. We're also working with broadcasters who are using Arch in their supply chain to be able to do edits right before things go to air. We're working with studios who are doing editorial for their productions and visual effects for their production. So, we're able to really tap in to all of these creative workloads and help the companies basically leverage the efficiencies of the cloud. One of the things I was looking at when I was doing some research on Arch on your website is that Arch has come a long way from its VFX roots. And just for short years, how have you guys accomplished that? Give us some of your magic. You know, I think part of that is everybody at the company comes from both a technical background and a creative background. So, folks either started VFX companies, worked at VFX companies, we're film producers. So, we understand this content creation process from beginning to end. And so, we understand a lot of where the pain points are and how we can leverage our platform and orchestration engine to really solve some of these problems. So, it's really, really deep domain expertise that has allowed us to really start to move in all of these areas of content creation. Deep domain expertise. When you're in customer conversations, I imagine that's one of your differentiators, but what are some of those key elements that really define and differentiate the Arch platform? You see, so, what we do, nobody else really does in the way we do it. So, there are systems integrators and consulting companies which will go in and build by hand bespoke solutions for a cloud studio. And they're great solutions, right? And, but we do it a little differently. We build infrastructure in the cloud by software. So, it's infrastructure as code, which means that everything is repeatable. It's auditable. It's fast. And also, because of that, and we make sure that everything's consistent. So, if we build a facility for somebody in London, their facility in Vancouver is going to be the same. Their software stacks are gonna be the same if they need to be the same, right? So, there's no drift. There's no drift in their fleet. And so, it's really helpful for our customers. In addition, the platform is built in such a way that the IT teams and the technical teams at these companies can build, monitor, and manage their resources on their own. So, it really helps drive efficiencies in the technical teams at these companies. Though, if there's a company that's a smaller company that may not have those technical or cloud-enabled teams, we can basically be their, essentially, their resource for maintaining the facilities for them. So, we'll work with our customers in many different ways. And you've got the capacity to be able to dial up, spin down, really meet those customers where they are, help them from a services perspective. But you talked about consistency. Consistency is such a key element in delivering the right user experience, right employee experience, the right end customer experience that's really critical for your customers to differentiate themselves. Can you give us a little peek into the product roadmap? What are some of the things we might be looking for in the next six to 12 months? Yeah, there's a couple of key elements. You know, last year, we started to support the integration of on-premises hardware, right? So, for example, since this is a game tech conversation, if you've got a Perforce server on-premises, for example, we can connect to that. We can connect the cloud workstations to that. If you've got a build form on-premises, we can connect the cloud workstations to that, right? Again, being able to support this infrastructure. Or if you've got workstations or, you know, dev kits on-premises that you want to connect to, we can make sure they're all accessible by the cloud workstations. So, what we're going to be doing over the next couple of years is expanding out our ability to work with this on-premises hardware. A lot of customers want to move to the cloud in phases. They may not want to move everything to the cloud right away, or they have a real workflow reason to keep resources on-premises. So, making more robust are a hybrid offering. And additionally, people have been really excited about the analytics and reporting that we have been providing. So, we're going to expand that out much more significantly so people can really, really dig in and into their usage patterns and, you know, find efficiencies, find where they can create better efficiencies in their organizations. It's all about efficiency and that end user experience being seamless, being consistent. Laura, we thank you so much for joining us on the program. Where do you want to direct the audience to go to learn more about ARCH and its platform? You can go to our website, archpt.io, to learn about our platform and you can reach out to us and we can set up a conversation and a demo so we can learn more about how we may be able to help you. Excellent, Laura, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for walking us through game development infrastructure in the cloud, what ARCH is doing, how it's different and amazing benefits, the wild successes that you're having and your customers are having. We really appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you for your time today, I appreciate it. My pleasure. We want to thank you for watching the AWS Industry Tech Partner Showcase. For Laura Titocio, I'm Lisa Martin. We'll see you next time.