HITS

Event driven architecture, data analytics and machine learning play key roles in the future digital supply chain path seen by Sony New Media Solutions, according to Kunal Shah, its VP of software engineering and architecture.

The Sony division has been in the cloud about three years and has been able to scale its digital supply chain by leveraging cloud technologies, he said July 2 during the AI, ML, CX & Supply Chain breakout session “Turbo Charge Your Digital Supply Chain to Scale” at the Global Media & Entertainment Day event presented live, virtually, from London.

“For a robust supply chain… scalability, reliability, security and maintainability would be equally important,” he told viewers.

But he focused on scalability, conceding that he would “barely be scratching the surface” because it was a short presentation.

A successful digital supply chain will not only meet demands but scale as an organization grows – keeping pace with increased distribution volumes, delivery deadlines and satisfying the requirements of all the different streaming platforms – all while ensuring its content is securely stored and readily accessible, according to the company. A digital supply chain system must successfully evolve to accommodate the increasing demand from content partners to meet distribution and monetization goals.

During the session, Shah discussed how Sony NMS transformed its platform using cloud technologies, allowing it to quickly adapt to evolving market demands, and also explained what it discovered throughout its journey and then highlighted the path forward.

The main challenges and opportunities that the company sees in its space include the evolving landscape, increased operating efficiency and the many different standards being used, he said.

Of the first challenge, the evolving landscape, he noted that each client has its own “bespoke needs… because they are trying to create unique experiences for their end user.”

When looking at scalability, meanwhile, “operating efficiency is very critical,” he pointed out, noting it allows a supply chain to “increase its throughput,” achieve faster turnaround and control cost.

“Right now we have a lot of different standards,” he also said, noting “there has been a lot of custom adaptation of similar standards,” which creates a challenge.

It was a natural progression to the cloud for his company, he noted, pointing to “dynamic scaling,” “solution augmentation” and cost optimization as three key factors.

The “key learnings” that Sony NMS has observed on its journey to the cloud and allowed it to “successfully scale our digital supply chain” have included the importance of design and architecture, the use of monitoring and analytics, and its personnel, he went on to say.

Turning to the “trend forward” on the future digital supply chain path, Shah said: “We feel that event driven architecture is going to be something which is going to be the future of the digital supply chain. And what we mean is we need to move from a world where we are reactive to be more proactive.” Playing key roles will be real-time processing, personalization and microservices, he said.

Data analytics, meanwhile, is “another very important trend that we are seeing,” he said, adding: “So far, we have not seen good predictive models” in terms of cost and time. That is an area, therefore, that it has been spending time studying in recent months, he noted.

Finally, the company is studying areas, including language recognition, that still require manual effort in the digital supply chain, he pointed out, adding: “We are partnering with AWS and figuring out how we can leverage machine learning. And we might not necessarily be at a point where we can just eliminate those manual steps,” but it can at least “augment it” and “slowly build that model.”

To view the presentation, click here.

To view the presentation slide deck, click here.

The fourth annual M&E Day event, presented by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), featured mainstage panels and more than 15 breakout sessions, covering the latest it data, cloud, IT and security across the media and entertainment technology ecosystem.

The event was presented by Caringo, with sponsorship by Convergent Risks, Cyberhaven, Richey May Technology Solutions, RSG Media, Signiant, Whip Media Group, Zendesk, Seagate Powered by Tape Ark, Sony NMS, 5th Kind, ATMECS, Eluvio, Tamr, the Audio Business Continuity Alliance (ABCA), the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) and The Trusted Partner Network (TPN).