Debunking M&E Myths with OpenDrives

Over the summer I sat down with Trevor Morgan and Alex Dunfray of OpenDrives to work through a set of enterprise video technology myths that the industry keeps repeating to itself.

The result is a series of recorded conversations about what enterprise video actually is, and why so much of the technology sold under that name was designed for someone else entirely.

Trevor is a storage CEO. Alex is a storage CTO. I sell and design operating models for organizations whose core business is not media. We do not agree on everything in these sessions, and we left the disagreements in.

In the first session Alex makes the case that the underlying technology is largely the same and only the packaging needs to change. I argue the opposite. In the fifth session I ask the industry to stop using the phrase “software defined” while sitting across from two people who sell software defined storage.

That is the reason to watch. These are not vendor talking points. They are seven arguments about a market that media technology companies keep describing to themselves rather than to the people who actually own the problem.

Session 1: The Corporate Video Myth

Corporate video, as presented at NAB and InfoComm, is a repackaging exercise. Vendors took a portfolio built for broadcast, pointed it at a new audience and changed the label. A law firm does not care about your codec. A healthcare provider does not care about frame rate. They have business objectives, and if your technology cannot address those, you are not in the enterprise video business.

You are still in the media tech business trying to push a square peg into a round hole.

https://youtu.be/lVOJoGH6jcA

Session 2: Removing the M&E Re-Labeling Band-Aid

Enterprise buyers need the good parts of modern media technology without the full stack a news broadcaster requires to put a CEO on a podcast. Corporate video does not start with a live broadcast or a town hall. It starts with a marketing budget, a project plan and a set of business objectives. This session covers where to find the person who owns the pain, why IT is rarely the right first conversation, and why the biggest cost in these environments is time.

Session 3: Understanding Enterprise Business Outcomes

Efficiency, extensibility and risk. Trevor makes the case that almost every enterprise buying decision reduces to those three, and that efficiency means something different to a CFO than it does to a head of IT. There is also a fourth outcome that rarely appears on a requirements document: will this purchase make me look like a good custodian of the company, or will I spend the next two years defending it?

Session 4: The Role of a Solutions Provider and Channel Partner

In the old media technology world every component was bespoke and hardware based, with its own interfaces and protocols, and nobody owned the connections between them. That model was unsuitable for organizations that do not staff a facility around the clock. This session is where I make the distinction Varde is built on.

Take the best of breed components and plug them together, and they work out of the box, because we are basing ourselves on industry standard protocols. That makes us a solution builder, not a systems integrator.

Coming soon.

Session 5: The Importance of Software-Defined Technology

Software defined was supposed to turn hardware into a consumable. It did not. Hardware is harder to source and more expensive than it has been in years, and moving workflows to the cloud exchanges one set of problems for another. The session ends on where this is heading next: every piece of technology in the world acquiring an MCP interface, with no rules attached, generating complexity that only another AI can supposedly resolve.

Coming soon.

Session 6: The Impact of AI in Enterprise Video

AI tools are being added at every layer of the content factory, from the storage subsystem to the edit suite. Almost nobody is discussing the prerequisites. Most of the data that matters already exists and is not accessible. Most of the business processes that AI is supposed to automate are not documented or understood. There is a large amount of analysis and business design that has to happen first.

AI is not going to fail because of unstructured data. It is going to fail because of unaccountable data.

Coming soon.

Session 7: A True Partner Ecosystem for Every Market

The media technology industry goes to NAB and IBC. The enterprises it claims to serve go to Insurtech, to Money 20/20, to Salesforce, to Microsoft Dynamics conferences and other places. I attended Insurtech this year and found that insurers are running video at scale on generic cloud technology for deposition management. Nobody from our industry was there to talk to them about the video part of their business.

There is gold in other hills.

Coming soon.

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The thread running through all seven sessions is that most organizations are already producing, storing and distributing video at volume without ever having designed a system to do it. Varde builds that system. We call it the Enterprise Video Content Factory.

If any of this sounds like your organization, book a free working session with Varde.