Why the Future of Digital Media Management Relies on Cloud Technology

Overtaxed IT teams and rising costs are big issues for small and medium-sized businesses trying to store and work with large digital media files on-premises. But to make the move to the cloud, they need a simple, secure solution for remote collaboration. Evolphin is a San Ramon, California-based company that has been providing cloud-based Digital Media Management Platforms with an emphasis on AI and collaboration since 2007. Evolphin’s flagship product, Evolphin Zoom, combines digital asset management (DAM) and media asset management (MAM) systems and utilizes in-memory deduplication. We spoke with Chief Technical Officer and founder Rahul Bhargava about how Evolphin was able to evolve into a cloud-native application and how they have helped their small and medium business customers improve business outcomes.

Q: Hi, Rahul. Evolphin Zoom allows customers to spend less time managing media assets and more time creating. Can you elaborate on how the product benefits users?

A: Evolphin Zoom uses a combination of a beautiful user experience for collaboration across the cloud, as well as some cool technologies, like our front-end deduplication technology that allows us to transfer data up rapidly from on-premises to the cloud and also reduce the amount of storage in the cloud. Those are some of the things that customers love about us.

Q: The Evolphin Zoom platform was originally developed for on-premises use. Can you explain how Amazon Web Services helped you transform its usage?

A: We basically took a monolithic app that was initially optimized for on-premises and made it cloud native by integrating with a lot of microservices that AWS offers.

Customer interest in the cloud quickly transformed into a necessity

Q: The demand for functional remote work situations increased and your customers’ needs changed as a result of COVID-19. What challenges did you face in meeting this new demand?

A: Our customers have been migrating or looking at migrating to the cloud, and the pandemic just accelerated that whole thing. When these customers started to think about migrating to the cloud, there were a couple of challenges. One was the cost of migrating all of this data into the cloud. The second issue that customers had was, if they did not migrate, the IT function on-premises is spread really thin. They don’t have resources to manage all this on-premises infrastructure. The cost of IT is escalating. They know that they have to move to the cloud, but how do they move to the cloud with all these factors? Security is a big concern with these customers.

The combination of all these AWS technologies and some of the technology strengths that we already had were applied to put together a secure solution in the cloud for these customers.

Evolphin began revolutionizing media workflows

Q: Evolphin Zoom offers customers intelligent workflows for different types of projects. Can you share some examples?

A: If somebody wants to edit from home, there are workflows that take advantage of Amazon Simple Cloud Storage (S3) Accelerated Transfer to bring down media to their home offices so they can edit with the high-resolution media from home. In AWS, we found technologies like S3 Accelerated Transfers and Transfer Manager that allow us to resume connections if they were interrupted, archiving in the cloud using intelligent tiering.

Q: Looking forward, what kind of innovation is Evolphin working on?

A: We are looking at an artificial intelligence automation strategy, and we’ve been working with the Amazon Rekognition team to bring recognition into media workflows with videos and images at an unprecedented scale. We are launching a new service that would essentially democratize AI for everyone, for small to medium businesses as well as large companies.

Cutting business costs and increasing efficiency with the cloud

Q: Cost is always a challenge when dealing with cloud migration. How do you help your clients right-size their spend?

A: These customers are concerned about migrating huge amounts of infrastructure into the cloud, so cost is always a challenge. With AWS, we were able to work out plans that made it cost effective. One of our Fortune 500 customers told us that by migrating into the cloud, they would end up saving [over 60%] over a period of three years, versus if they had run this workload on-premises or with another cloud provider.

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Q: You have some customers who are extremely small, both in terms of team and profit. How does Evolphin’s technology specifically benefit them?

A: We have customers that are nonprofits or really small businesses with five or 10 people in the creative team. Using technologies that we have created and a combination of the services that AWS offers, that total cost of ownership of a solution can be far less than what they would do by putting together ad hoc solutions or outsourcing IT.

Q: You’ve spoken about one customer, a country music provider with a small team, who was struggling to send video-on-demand productions to various streaming platforms. Were you able to help them cut costs?

A: Yes, the amount they were spending on transferring media from one location to another and collaborating with their editors, who were remote freelancers, all of that came down significantly. They probably reduced their overall IT spend by 50-60% by moving to this solution.

Q: Lastly, what specifically drew you to AWS as a cloud services provider?

A: Evolphin is a small-to-medium business, but it’s rapidly evolving. We have a lot of innovative workflows that we are bringing to the table. That often requires some off-the-wall thinking on how to price it out and structure it in the cloud. We found in AWS how best to implement these [structures] and make it cost effective.

Next steps

AWS helps Evolphin serve customers who handle large media files and complex workflows, often uniting with remote teams who need efficient and organized creative pipelines for their work. Learn how AWS media and entertainment solutions for small and medium businesses can help your team navigate the ever-changing industry and collaborate across the cloud.

Disclaimer: The content and opinions in this post are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.