This Wednesday, 4th December, I will be hosting the seventh webinar within AmberFin’s Bruce’s Shorts program and I just wanted to give you a ‘heads up’ so that you can put it in your busy schedule:

The webinar will look at the fascinating issue of ‘Enterprise Class Workflows’ and in particular it will focus on Transcode Farm requirements. Like many radical concepts, I will demonstrate how these workflows can and indeed must start on a small scale and then grow to support your business development.

The webinar explains exactly what Enterprise Class Workflows are – a class of project or undertaking that can be both bold and complex that is undertaken for a business or company. Or to put it another way, it is a solution to a difficult challenge that is taken on in a financially oriented way. The webinar highlights the fact that these workflows are always financially driven – it’s all about the money, about costs versus benefits.

Enterprise Class Workflows – profit driven planning for business growth 

The key issue with Enterprise Class Workflows is ROI (Return on Investment) in terms of how these working methodologies can create more profit and revenue, whilst reducing costs and increasing efficiency. When properly conceptualized, an Enterprise Class Workflow will be financially aware, sustainable, reliable, robust, efficient, scalable and flexible. And just as important, in the webinar, I will explain that these workflows do not need to be massive nor expensive.

In my experience, most Enterprise Class Workflows that fail to meet their objectives do so because of a lack of thought and planning at the critical early stages. They fail to sketch out and capture the complete workflow requirements, including the all important omissions. Normally, the designer does not understand how to measure success and progress in this critical developmental stage. I will highlight the importance of planning for the worst case scenario whilst hoping for the best.

Putting Enterprise Class Workflows under the microscope

During the Webinar, I will put our AmberFin approach to Enterprise Class Workflows under the microscope. I will demonstrate why it is so important to build a proof of concept – a small scale version of your big idea. This approach enables you to mitigate and plan for problems whilst simultaneously putting most of your effort where the money is.

AmberFin iCR transcode farms are scalable from one to many nodes whilst always providing fault tolerant operating systems. I will demonstrate how with AmberFin iCR you can scale up your proof of concept to whatever system capacity you require without needing any kind of external orchestration system.

AmberFin iCR employs a Network License Manager, which means that your key software licenses can float around the network and be used when and where they are needed in the most cost-efficient and effective ways. Also Quality Control of your media files is just another job within AmberFin iCR. Yes, QC is critical within any file-based workflow but we don’t restrict the workflow in any way to address the need for QC – the transcode/QC unifier sits under the controller.

Think enterprise, think scalable 

Within AmberFin iCR, Enterprise Class Workflows start with Mini Transcode Farms on a single chassis and one transcode node that are not redundant but are resilient. The smallest configuration still employs all the same technology and methodology as the largest capacity workflow so your proof of concept remains true to the eventual large-scale workflow. We offer extra functionality options – such as standards conversion, captions, Dolby audio processing and watermarking – which float around the workflow in identical ways to the other software licenses.

Within this Webinar, I will prove that it is easy to take a really complex task and create a very simple, elegant workflow solution that supports your operating staff and also pleases your CFO by offering the best ROI possible. I will show that with the right planning and thought processes, coupled with AmberFin technology, you can create an Enterprise Class Workflow that is designed for business change and also designed for fault tolerance.

Yes, it is all about the money, but that does not mean that you need to jump in with a large scale system – with AmberFin iCR it is easy to scale your workflow to mirror your business needs.