Cloud helps enterprise see the big picture
Azure plus the cloud equals big savings and a big new opportunity
By Ian Harvey
April 6, 2011
April 6, 2011
VRX Studios’ story is a case of the tail wagging the dog. The company was faced with a problem, and the solution it came up with is now poised to generate more revenue than the company’s original business plan. The company recently created a cloud-based system that archives, tags and retrieves massive numbers of high-resolution images and videos. This allows clients, suppliers and resellers to access, search, select and license these properties quickly and easily.
But the story actually starts more than a decade ago when CEO David Mac-Laren raised $1.5 million from investors to start VRX. The plan was to facilitate the creation of high-quality images for the global travel and hospitality industry.
The enterprise was so successful that in 2001 MacLaren bought out the VC company that funded his start-up and renamed it VRX Worldwide, with VRX Studios as a subsidiary.
“We’re a full-service company,” Mac-Laren said. “We shoot hotel lobbies, rooms and features and then arrange to distribute and license the content to travel companies for use in marketing on their Web sites and in other materials.”
With 10,000 hotels on its client roster, the challenge became one of storing, sorting, tagging and accessing the images in a timely fashion; this grew more challenging when demand increased for high-quality video and high-resolution images. Larger files require more storage and higher-speed bandwidth.
Two years ago VRX was starting to buckle under the weight of its own success, MacLaren said. With everything managed in-house, the intellectual property assets were sprawling into hundreds of terabytes of data. “It was starting to break down and bolting on new components as we developed the business wasn’t possible, because the architecture wasn’t scalable.
“Then we found our clients had the same issue.”
Buy or build?
One new system the company tried hit a wall after 18 months, and the idea of licensing a digital asset management system and adapting it to their needs just wasn’t going to work, he said. So last July the company started from scratch again, looking at designing a custom system based on its unique requirements. “There was an opportunity here. This was not just an internal system: we wanted to build a system to meet our needs and those of our travel and hotel customers which could handle thousands of users at a time. We needed a simple, easy-to-use highly scalable server system which was secure and accessible anywhere in the world.”
The search led to Microsoft Azure, an operating system designed specifically for cloud computing. While still in its infancy (it launched in February 2010), MacLaren’s team saw potential in Azure’s three key pillars: computational power, storage and high-speed networkability. Azure also gave the company access to the Content Delivery Network (CDN), a caching service spread across 18 global centres that helps deliver maximum network throughput.
In record time—July to October 2010—the team wrote the overlay code for its application, called MediaValet, and rolled it out for a soft launch. Already it has more than 10,000 registered users and a couple of hundred terabytes of assets. Luckily, all this information was tagged as it was created, making “finding a single image from millions as simple as a Google search,” MacLaren said. “I can’t really quantify a return on investment but I can say we got to market 40 per cent faster and cheaper than doing it the old, traditional way.”
New business
Without Azure, VRX could not have afforded to build and deploy an effective solution, and the company is now considering other industry sectors where MediaValet could be used.
Advertising agencies, consumer packaged goods with multiple brands and even health-care industries with medical images such as digital X-rays, MRIs and CAT scans might be interested. “This isn’t what we expected when we started on this.”
Also read:
Backbone's cloud computing issue - March 2010
But the story actually starts more than a decade ago when CEO David Mac-Laren raised $1.5 million from investors to start VRX. The plan was to facilitate the creation of high-quality images for the global travel and hospitality industry.
The enterprise was so successful that in 2001 MacLaren bought out the VC company that funded his start-up and renamed it VRX Worldwide, with VRX Studios as a subsidiary.
“We’re a full-service company,” Mac-Laren said. “We shoot hotel lobbies, rooms and features and then arrange to distribute and license the content to travel companies for use in marketing on their Web sites and in other materials.”
With 10,000 hotels on its client roster, the challenge became one of storing, sorting, tagging and accessing the images in a timely fashion; this grew more challenging when demand increased for high-quality video and high-resolution images. Larger files require more storage and higher-speed bandwidth.
Two years ago VRX was starting to buckle under the weight of its own success, MacLaren said. With everything managed in-house, the intellectual property assets were sprawling into hundreds of terabytes of data. “It was starting to break down and bolting on new components as we developed the business wasn’t possible, because the architecture wasn’t scalable.
“Then we found our clients had the same issue.”
Buy or build?
One new system the company tried hit a wall after 18 months, and the idea of licensing a digital asset management system and adapting it to their needs just wasn’t going to work, he said. So last July the company started from scratch again, looking at designing a custom system based on its unique requirements. “There was an opportunity here. This was not just an internal system: we wanted to build a system to meet our needs and those of our travel and hotel customers which could handle thousands of users at a time. We needed a simple, easy-to-use highly scalable server system which was secure and accessible anywhere in the world.”
The search led to Microsoft Azure, an operating system designed specifically for cloud computing. While still in its infancy (it launched in February 2010), MacLaren’s team saw potential in Azure’s three key pillars: computational power, storage and high-speed networkability. Azure also gave the company access to the Content Delivery Network (CDN), a caching service spread across 18 global centres that helps deliver maximum network throughput.
In record time—July to October 2010—the team wrote the overlay code for its application, called MediaValet, and rolled it out for a soft launch. Already it has more than 10,000 registered users and a couple of hundred terabytes of assets. Luckily, all this information was tagged as it was created, making “finding a single image from millions as simple as a Google search,” MacLaren said. “I can’t really quantify a return on investment but I can say we got to market 40 per cent faster and cheaper than doing it the old, traditional way.”
New business
Without Azure, VRX could not have afforded to build and deploy an effective solution, and the company is now considering other industry sectors where MediaValet could be used.
Advertising agencies, consumer packaged goods with multiple brands and even health-care industries with medical images such as digital X-rays, MRIs and CAT scans might be interested. “This isn’t what we expected when we started on this.”
Also read:
Backbone's cloud computing issue - March 2010
