UPDATE: Post show report
OK, I forgot how big the show is...
In previous years I have attended as an exhibitor. I've always been aware of the size but have never traversed the various halls and walkways to chat to people.
Being one of Loadbalancer.org's strengths, I focused my attention on vendors with asset management products. You might recall, that I wrote a blog about why I was attending in the first place.
My findings...
One overriding theme was that availability and failover was often considered non-critical. The mindset was that because media asset management systems overlay existing infrastructure, files remained intact. Users could continue to work, albeit with a less slick workflow.
I get that, but...why not make sure your application doesn't fail?
Failure to deliver a reliable platform, affects both productivity and product perception.
So, my visit turned into a mission of education and promoting the benefits of scalable application delivery in the broadcast media industry.
Naturally, some of the larger enterprise products had already solved that headache. Either embedding in their own products, or in the case of our partners Ross Video and Evertz using 3rd party solutions such as Loadbalancer.org. Some have built cloud products, levering existing load balancing capability such as Amazon ELB. Azure proved to be a popular platform, owing in part to aggressive pricing.
In both platforms, vendors would benefit from our enhanced cloud load balancer features such as our API and custom health checks.
I spent a good chunk of time catching up with our partners, who fortunately, had only good things to say. It was great to gain a better understanding of the use cases and to learn about future product developments.
Looking ahead...
IBC 2017 proved to be both productive and insightful. Time will tell if discussions will progress into more fledgling partnerships. Hopefully, next year, we will see more vendors with load balancing capability.
We will continue to research our strengths within other broadcast areas such as streaming media, where we have already forged successful partnerships.
Next year I will allow myself an extra day, and some gel insoles!
