New Product Aims to Organize the Chaos of Various IT-based Workflows

A company called Signiant believes it's poised to dominate an emerging product category – digital media distribution management for media and entertainment organizations. “The category is something no one has heard of before,” said Tom Ohanian, introducing Signiant's Digital Media Distribution Management Suite. In a nutshell, Ohanian says, it's designed to “centrally manage how digital media is distributed inside and among organizations.”
Ohanian has some experience in sussing out the needs of media organizations – he’s a broadcast engineer with co-invention of Avid’s Media Composer and Film Composer systems to his credit. And Signiant itself, originally built as an operation within Nortel, has spent 10 years working out ways to facilitate moving large amounts of content within and between organizations. About a year ago, the company decided to shift its strategy from service-provider markets to the media and entertainment industries, with eyes on the growth rates they could offer, and hired Ohanian to lead product development.

The key to Signiant’s product, Ohanian stresses, is flexibility – it’s open and extensible technology designed around file-based, IP-centered workflows. “We’re not an asset-management or content-management or encoding and transcoding system – but we play very nicely with those products.” The idea, Ohanian said, is to give facilities the ability to easily specify exactly how media files should move around their operation.

It sounds simpler than it is, of course. A company whitepaper describes three tiers of system architecture: application modules and components, a Central Media Manager, and various Media Agents. The Central Media Manager is a “command-and-control center” that sends instructions to the Media Agents, which are deployed in specific locations in the organization. The application-modules-and-components tier, where users interact with the system through a Web interface, also allows the system to interface with other applications like content-management systems or encoders. Workflows are specified and enabled using various customizable job templates that describe exactly how media is to be managed across the system.

More generally, Ohanian describes four “pillars” of the system: central management, acceleration, security, and automation. “Could you put it all together with off-the-shelf equipment? Sure,” admits Ohanian. “You could buy the hardware, do some Perl scripts, and develop a central management component – or you can utilize our Digital Media Distribution Management Suite.” In other words, while highly capable products already exist in each of those categories, Signiant’s sales pitch revolves around a comprehensive approach that relieves a system administrator of the unwelcome burden of figuring out how to properly manage such an array of individual components.

The Digital Media Distribution Management Suite will be shown in April at Signiant’s booth at NAB. For more information, visit www.signiant.com.