Digital Rapids Unveils Dynamic New Approach to Media Operations with Kayak Workflow Platform

Ground-breaking, powerful and flexible platform enables customers, systems integrators and software developers to design, deploy and manage efficient customized workflows.

Las Vegas, NV(16 Apr 2012)

 

Digital Rapids -- the trusted provider of innovative solutions and technology for bringing content to wider audiences -- is launching the powerful and flexible new Kayak workflow platform at the 2012 NAB Show. A significant departure from other workflow technology approaches, Kayak enables customers, systems integrators and software developers to design, deploy and manage customized workflows that empower their businesses with the operational efficiency, agility and insight they need to thrive in the expanding multi-screen media landscape.

The Kayak platform powers the advances 'under the hood' of the upcoming version 2.0 of the Digital Rapids Transcode Manager software. The broader power, capabilities and vision of the Kayak platform itself are now being unveiled for the first time. 

"The exploding opportunity and ongoing, consumer-driven shifts in the media and entertainment market require content owners to radically change how they think about their media operations," said Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids Corporation. "Kayak's innovative workflow approach lets them harness technology, streamline their operations and quickly turn their ideas into execution, freeing them to focus on their real value proposition -- their content." 

"In today's dynamic and ubiquitous video environment, end-user video consumption patterns are dictating how, when and where they view content," said Mukul Krishna, Global Director, Digital Media at global analyst firm Frost & Sullivan. "To cope with the flood of content, media formats and device types it is now business-critical for media companies to have the agility to be proactive instead of being reactive to the demands of multi-platform video delivery. A solution like Kayak greatly helps bridge that gap and enables media companies to achieve higher operational freedom for their digital media workflows."

A New Vision in Media Workflows

Unlike workflow approaches that simply orchestrate between separate applications across multiple workflow stages, Kayak is built on a philosophy of granular modularity with technologies as components -- from media-specific functions like encoding, packaging and processing to business-oriented functionality such as analytics, automated intelligence and reporting. These workflow building blocks are warehoused in a catalog of best-of-breed technologies and solutions from Digital Rapids and a broad array of third-party partners, creating a rich, open ecosystem of easy-to-access technology. 

Kayak's catalog of components combines with its flexible architecture to make integrating new or custom-developed functionality easier than ever before, enabling faster response to the latest market trends. Kayak's component-based approach also provides granular control over technology costs and provisioning, as users deploy only precisely the technologies they actually need for their specific workflows. 

Analogous to a whiteboard that can be turned instantly into reality, Kayak Workflow Designer lets users graphically combine these catalog components into sophisticated, streamlined workflows with intelligent automation. Inline analysis and rule-based decision branching automatically adapt workflows to eliminate unnecessary steps, maximizing both processing and operational efficiency. Designs can be instantly tested within Kayak Workflow Designer before moving them directly into production, providing a streamlined path from proof-of-concept to deployment. 

Dynamic Deployment and Simplified Management 

Kayak workflows are dynamically provisioned on-the-fly on available system resources, ensuring that the right workflows are available at the right scale to match job requirements and volumes at any given time. The functionality running on a particular system can change dynamically with each job, maximizing resource utilization while lowering provisioning costs. This dynamic deployment model brings cloud-like elasticity to on-premises operations, minimizes upgrade effort with on-the-fly updates, and makes it significantly easier to expand capacity by minimizing the overhead required to bring new systems online. By providing complete transparency into workflow execution, Kayak lets users easily identify and resolve bottlenecks, further optimize resource allocation, and predict and manage operating costs.

Kayak workflows can be run seamlessly on-premises or in the cloud. Demonstrations in Microsoft Corp.'s booth, SL1524, will showcase Kayak media processing workflows running on Windows Azure. Demos will feature Kayak Cloud Engines both as on-demand extensions of on-premises operations and within Windows Azure Media Services, a new set of cloud-based media technologies that enable Microsoft customers and partners to create, distribute and manage customized media solutions across all types of devices and platforms.

"The combination of Digital Rapids' Kayak workflow platform and Windows Azure provide media organizations with an array of business and technical benefits," said Sudheer Sirivara, senior director of Windows Azure Media Services at Microsoft. "We're excited to be working with Digital Rapids to bring our customers' ready-to-use media solutions to life with Windows Azure Media Services."

"Media companies require their media processing platform to be automated, scalable and agile in order to generate the media their customers want in a competitive yet profitable way," concluded Avni Rambhia, Analyst for Digital Media at Frost & Sullivan. "The benefits of Kayak correspond to the top-of-mind issues identified by premium media organizations in our research."

The complete range of Digital Rapids solutions and technologies is being showcased in booth number SL5624 at the 2012 NAB Show, April 16-19 in Las Vegas. For more information about Digital Rapids, please visit www.digitalrapids.com.

About Digital Rapids Corporation -- Digital Rapids provides market-leading content transformation and workflow solutions that empower the world's leading media organizations to reach wider audiences more efficiently, more effectively and more profitably. Recipients of more than two dozen prestigious awards for company and product excellence, Digital Rapids combines innovative technology with proven expertise and visionary insight to help our customers expand their audiences, increase their revenues, and reduce their costs. Digital Rapids Corporation (www.digitalrapids.com) is headquartered in Ontario, Canada with offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Australia and Argentina.