Industry Perspectives: System Integrators Help Digital Media Companies Combat the Recession

System integrators are enabling customers to transition to tapeless workflows and focus on total content optimization. "Search optimization is a key issue that customers require in today’s market," says James Scott, Head of Asia Pacific Accenture’s media and entertainment division. He remarks that enabling sharing of content across geographies, across divisions, and across business groups in today’s environment is critical and with IP proliferation, there is rising demand for solutions to enable this in the market.

HCL’s Altman echoes and points out the dynamic underground transition that has begun to take effect and gradually turning the B2B media businesses into B2C, because of the increasing widespread consumption of media content over wireless and internet networks. "Unfortunately, not many media companies—barring a few exceptions like Disney—have sufficient brand exposure and suddenly they realize that they have to deal with consumers."

Also, telco service providers globally are entering the realm of mainstream video content distribution, and the challenges to source content from traditional sources and distribute either by IPTV or/and Internet and wireless avenues are compounded.

While the necessity to distribute content across multiple media continues to rise, the industry stakeholders face tremendous challenges in evolving their ecosystems to abet the same. Restrained by budgets, customers have to work with the highly fragmented workflows—partially analog and partially digital—including many systems that might not be compatible with each other.

As a result, parts of the vendor ecosystem are likely to be significantly affected. Accenture’s Vernocchi offers the view that if "in the past, media investments focused on the content acquisition and content management solutions of the ecosystem; in the next six to 18 months, more emphasis will on the ending part of the value chain, such as distribution and monitoring—more specifically focused on the way content is utilized by the end user."

Vernocchi believes that customers will need to prioritize on their business ends. "Considering that digitization has been underway for a few years now, the key challenge for companies it to recover or increase revenues. And hence customers are paying more attention to content distribution, as it is related to the ability to monetize their assets."

System Integration Solutions for Digital Media
Digital media is a reality, and system integrators are committing increasing resources to digital media as a function. Leading vendors such as Accenture, IBM, and HP have all been working to expand their digital media initiatives to attune to their customer requirements. Accenture, for instance, established Accenture Digital Media Services Group (ADMS) in 2007 after the acquisition of Digiplug, a solution provider for the music industry. The portfolio of solutions was expanded with the acquisition of Origin Digital, a video solution platform company, in 2008. IBM offers a host of solutions with its Digital Media Factory effort glued together by its MediaHub, a web-services based architecture.

A typical solution workflow includes ingest, post-production, content management system, search, digital rights management, managed business hosting, storage, content aggregation, streaming media server, and distribution to various media and devices. New solutions include internet- and mobile-specific workflow solutions with emphasis on traffic monitoring, ad insertion, and live and on demand streaming. There is a growing focus on building web services-based architecture and open-source based solutions in order to integrate a customer’s legacy headend equipment with new media processes seamlessly.

Making a number of quiet inroads in this market, however, are India-headquartered IT software companies such as Infosys, HCL, TCS among others, which offer comparable suite of solutions to broadcasters and telcos. Most of these vendors have established offices in multiple regions for the media and entertainment practice for establishing client-facing business ends. Infosys and HCL have already gained customers in United States and Western Europe, among other regions in this market. While some of these vendors focus on specific application delivery services such as IPTV and mobile video, others provide a comprehensive suite of workflow solutions that are highly flexible and customizable.

System integrators across the industry echo that though there is immediate slowdown in the market, the media customers will require adopting digital media efforts for survival as well as further growth. System integrators are driving dedicated efforts during this recession to gain proximity with their customers and execute challenging environments.