When the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2021 show was postponed until 2022, just a month before the long-standing industry event was scheduled to begin, Qumulo decided to continue the conversation virtually. Three short weeks later, we hosted the first Qumulo M&E Summit.
NAB 2021 may have been canceled but the show went on!
Even though we could not gather in-person at NAB we still had plenty to talk about. The virtual event focused on everything from thought leadership, to real-world change management, to technical showcases of what customers can achieve with unstructured data using Qumulo’s file system coupled with our partners’ technologies.
In case you missed it, you can watch a replay of the M&E Summit featuring many of our customers and partners in discussions about the unique challenges and opportunities facing the industry today.
While Qumulo’s customers come from a wide range of industries including healthcare, financial services and higher education, the media and entertainment industry is where we found much of our early success and where we continue to enjoy a strong rapport.
As Jade McQueen, VP of Media & Entertainment for Box, said in the opening panel, “M&E is a very resilient industry. It always has been, always will be. It was this industry that figured out how to handle COVID restrictions and testing very early on. This enabled it to get productions back up and running and people back to work. Resiliency is embedded into its DNA.”
Taking a cloud-first approach to change management
The Data Storage Trends panel kicked off the event and featured McQueen, Dan Lin of ViacomCBS, and Steve Cronan of 5th KIND. In addition to resilience, the discussion covered the realities of managing remote teams, tackling corporate acquisitions, and launching new services, such as Paramount Plus, during a global pandemic.
Many of the panelists found that a cloud-first approach was the best way to manage projects during COVID, and the group predicted that this shift is here to stay. As Dan Lin of ViacomCBS summed it up in his closing remarks, “People, process, and platforms are the keys to effective change management.”
Another session with Qumulo and AWS executives discussed how to build a high-level cloud strategy and the crucial role played by the data storage architecture. Specifically, they covered how to best manage large-scale unstructured data both on-premises and in the public cloud for M&E-specific workflows. During a later session, a technical deep dive featured how to seamlessly shift media workstreams from the enterprise data center to the cloud with Qumulo and AWS. For a deeper dive, be sure to watch the tutorial and demos here.
Finally, the Summit wrapped up with a powerful conversation between Qumulo CEO Bill Richter, Robert Crowther of Atomic Cartoons, and Jean-Paul (JP) Godmaire of Industrial Brothers. It opened up with Bill likening IT managers to the firefighters of the M&E industry, which Robert and JP found both humorous and accurate.
Both Atomic Cartoons and Industrial Brothers animation studios are regularly faced with strict production deadlines, and they each discussed the different paths their teams take to reach them. Robert shared insights into what it was like setting up an office in another country, only to be interrupted due to COVID-related international border closures. JP touched on what was involved in shifting his team’s workload to the cloud in an extremely short amount of time.
Qumulo was proud to help the show go on by hosting the virtual M&E Summit in 2021 and we invite you to tune in to the compelling discussions.
