#40 “How to Buy a DAM...and How Not To”

Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. My name's Jason Whetstone, senior workflow architect at Chesapeake systems. I'm joined today by my cohost, mr Ben Kilburg, senior solutions architect. Hey Ben. Hi Jason. How's it going? Good man. How are you? I'm pretty good. We have some pretty cool guests today for the workflow show. This is episode 40. I'm going to get the number right this time. Uh, this is episode 40 of the workflow show and we are going to be talking about today how to buy a dam or a ma'am or a Pam and maybe a little bit about how not to and uh, some, some things to think about when looking at these, at these systems, what they are, what they mean for you, what they can do for you or what they might be able to do for you and how a deployment can go well. Speaker 0 00:45 And that's really our goal when we go into a project like this, let's say potentially a huge endeavor for your organization to go through something like this. And, uh, we want to talk about what makes these kinds of endeavor successful and how they can also go wrong. So we can avoid these kinds of things. So, uh, joining us today, I have, uh, in the studio at Chesapeake systems, Jeremy Streetman, VP of business development with square box. Hey Jeremy, how's it going? Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming from New York, New York, and also joining us today. Uh, remotely is mr Bryson Jones, uh, founder and CIO of North shore automation in California. Hey Bryson, how's it going? Speaker 1 01:27 What's up guys? What's up? Um, wish I was there. Actually. This is a fun crew, man. Speaker 0 01:30 Yeah, that's cool. Thank you for joining us. We really appreciate your time. First of all, let's just really quickly cover these acronyms that we use here on the workflow show and in the industry. Damn Pam, ma'am, wham, uh, you know, and, and they all mean somewhat similar things in somewhat, you know, maybe vastly different things. So dam, digital asset management, usually when we say a damn, that's a more generic all encompassing term. It could mean a, ma'am, it could mean a Pam. Generally it's any kind of system that helps you manage your digital assets. They could be movies, photos, videos, images, whatever. So that's generally a more, uh, a more broad term. So organizations go ahead. And I'm typically what I think of, damn, I think of something that's used corporate wide, that's a whole lot of assets could be in baked by the organization itself, by the team and the organization. Speaker 1 02:23 Yeah. If you, if you're, if our audience here probably searching for information about the dam on the internet, they're going to get a lot of information about how like an insurance company manages their PDFs, right. And all their contracts because that's part of that. And so it is, it's good that you're making these distinction because, you know, the next definition is really probably more what we're talking about here. Speaker 0 02:41 Yeah. Which would be the mass media asset management. So generally we are talking about not so much, not so much PDFs. A lot of, a lot of almost every man can manage and proxy PDFs, but primarily we're talking about, um, the, the very special needs of our industry. Large files, uh, potentially taking up lots and lots of room on your storage, lots of bandwidth working with technologies, more like sands and maybe object storage than necessarily maybe a network shared file systems and things like that. So media asset management is going to be more concerned on the media professional workflows and tasks that you as media professionals are doing day in, day out, ingest, editorial delivery, those kinds of things. Uh, and usually encompasses more workflow automation and background. I was just going to say a lot of times the media asset management platforms that you're going to be talking about things like what is a proxy, what is my data rate for my proxy, what's my bit rate, what's the frame size going to be? Speaker 0 03:39 Those kinds of things. Uh, and usually ma'ams do have a workflow orchestration component. Not all of them do. Uh, usually they have some kind of a hook into some other workflow orchestration. They've got an API application programming interface or something like that, SDK, software development kit, something like that. Uh, then we move into, uh, Pam production asset management. So, uh, Pam would be something that is much more concerned with you as an editor, getting content into your NLE, whether it's premier, avid, whatever it is, working with it, and then getting that project back into the system. So it's going to be doing things like checking in your project when you're done working on it so that all those assets get ingested into the system. Checking the project out in the morning, maybe sharing projects between different members of the group and things like that. Speaker 1 04:29 Yeah, and I'll add that as probably the hardest and most thankless part of the industry is Pam. He's a lot of moving parts. You know, you can build a mound or an automation in like ma'am or dam and everything's really consistent. You know, like in a broadcast chain or something, it's all the same. You throw editors and editorial into the Knicks and all of a sudden it's like, Whoa, you know, and multiple vendors, it really does get complex. Absolutely. Speaker 0 04:53 Absolutely. And you know, also the other thing that we talked about on the last episode was codex. Uh, the PAMs are usually the ones that are tasked with sort of interpreting all those different codecs from all the different, uh, you know, footage, you know, camera companies and all that stuff. So, um, you know, and, uh, and then we've got another term which I think probably not as many people are familiar with, which is wham, workflow, asset management, uh, also workflow orchestration. You know, and I just think, I like to bring this up because I think it's very important to, uh, to state that a workflow orchestration is really, uh, it's not something that all of these systems do or do. Well. Some of them have some more orchestration components, but they might not do such a great job. And then, you know, they might also have their own API. Uh, and then, so then you've got this system over here with an API and this system over here with an API and you want them to talk to each other. But obviously they weren't written by the same company. They don't have the same concepts. So then there's a piece of middleware that you have to develop and uh, you know, so that the systems that, that really are a mix of having built in workflow orchestration and maybe a little bit of that middleware component are, are oftentimes really cool. So, yeah. Speaker 1 06:06 Yeah, absolutely. It's great that you call that out separately because, because workflow and automation are very different than just getting a dam or a man, right. When you're talking about that, um, and it's, it's a big deal too, because we joke all the time about people, you know, people getting mad, you know, you get these crazy RFPs, these, you know, that, that have, these are list of requirements and sometimes they have things that we, you know, Jeremy and I, and we talk about the $10,000 sentence, you know, you're like, well, there's, everything's good, everything's good. And then you're like, Oh, that sentence adds 10 grand or whatever to it, you know? Speaker 2 06:39 Well, but yeah, yeah, Speaker 1 06:40 Yeah, yeah. You're like, Oh, and then I just want to know the last one, last thing, the classic Steve jobs. You have the client's like, I want to do this and this. And you're like, yeah. And you know Ben is sitting there taking notes. Yeah. And then he gets to the end and he's just like, Oh, you know, like Oh wait, what that, and so it's interesting that you, when you're designing and doing discovery, that's, you know, part of our discussion today is like discovery on this because part of the deal is, is that yeah man, you gotta you gotta watch for those, those sentences, right. Cause that stuff happens and it gets weird. But um, at the same time, that's also so often where the, like the real, the, that's where the rubber hits the road and things really get valuables when you can do that. Speaker 0 07:16 Yeah. So we really don't want to shortchange that discovery process. Right. That's such an important part of, of any kind of engagement with an integrator or even directly talking to maybe a developer or a, you know, company that writes and makes these solutions. Speaker 2 07:30 Yeah. That's the hardest part, right? That is, that is the hardest part because it takes a lot of time and dedication and um, yeah, I can't tell, tell you how many conversations that start out for those who have experienced with us really trying to dive into that discovery process. Sometimes I'll get calls from, from folks who know our process and they'll say, look, this one's an easy one. This one's really simple. This one's pretty much plug and play. So no need to ask 10,000 questions. And it's like, now it doesn't, it's not, that's, you have to put the time into it. Speaker 1 08:07 The North shore has actually been yelled at by, by vendors, by customers, by resellers for taking too long and discovery. And, and we wish that people would see that that's pointing to like, that's actually pointing you to a level of complexity that you should pay attention to. Right. Um, and now to that, Jeremy, you can, you also know that the, probably the, those of us on this call, if somebody is doing a phase one dam with no automation, you just want to put in a baby, ma'am. No automation, nothing. Get going, get going. You can do that. You may not be completely pleased with it, but you could do a base phase without a ton of discovery. But like I said, you may not be excited by it. And it also, it leads us to something we'll talk about later, which is those are typically not that successful in my experience because if you're not really doing much with the ma'am, then people are not that excited about it, you're probably going to use it, Speaker 2 08:56 Right. You're putting resource into it. You're not getting much out. I mean, there's something to be said for building a database of metadata and useful information, but that data is not going to be available to any of your constituents, your customers, your, your users, all of that. So, so nobody can query against it and all of that there. There is a time though when you do need to fill the bucket, right? Uh, full of information. Speaker 1 09:21 Just shovel, shovel it in. Speaker 2 09:23 Yeah. But, but, but that has to be clearly defined as a part of a phase. I was going to say we do, we did write a fuller phase half or phase zero, but we do find much success with these phased approaches to deploying ma'ams. But we have to be very clear about what these phases are going to entail, what we, what we really want to have on day one and what we are going to sort of push off until maybe next year's budget cycle or something like that. So um, you know, it, it really comes down to the communication and just the clarity and that and that discovery. Bryson, Speaker 1 09:55 So Jason, let's run down for a second. Let's just give, just cause we don't stay too long on discovery. Let's run down kind of topics people need to think about that they might not be thinking about. Right. Particularly for me in that like, especially if someone's in the post production or you know, the video department, they're always going to be talking about their video. They are obsessed with their video and their media and I got this media and I have this much I do and that's great. But there are things like, what's your it first, what's your relationship like with it? Right? Does it like you, do you like it? Like what's that like, what's your infrastructure now? Are there challenges there? Are there security concerns? Exactly, right? Yeah. There's security concerns. All those things are not really sexy when you're thinking of like, yeah, I'm going to be able to find everything. Speaker 1 10:39 And like Jeremy was saying, well, you may be able to put everything in, but then are there 50 people that need to see this that are in a remote office? And that complicates things? Absolutely. Codex, as you mentioned earlier, dill, we don't tell you how many times we get into a gig and then all of a sudden it's like, Oh, Hey, by the way, I've got 40 terabytes of red that I didn't mention. You know? And you're like, okay, well that's great. You know? Um, Jeremy, think of your, like, let's, yeah, let's just run through the, you know, it's like not to be negative and let's run through the nightmares. Right? What do people forget? They forget codex. They forget, um, a scale. You know, how fast does this all need to work? Are you using, Speaker 2 11:13 How fast does content need to hit NLE before they need to start editing? And then what's the turnaround? Yeah. What about business continuity? Like backup, Speaker 1 11:23 Look at you. What did you being all Chesapeake and everything I saw, I listened to that show. Yeah, no, exactly right. Like I can't tell you how many rigs are out there running. Uh, you know, we, we knew a lot of redeployments. We, we noticed show has a package that we literally call once more with feeling and we'll talk about that later. We, we, we, we, we pick up a lot of ghost ships. We call them and just crank it away in the closet. No one's running it. And they're like, what's going on with this? Well, I think my favorite one is I think we have catnip. I literally hear that from customers with the sticker on it that says cat DV. I think literally. Yeah. You're like, yeah, this tall guy came one time and told us we haven't got any, but, but, um, it's unbelievable. Speaker 1 12:04 Uh, but yeah, but with that, you know, with the ghost ship, right? You, you know, usually that points to one of these things being overlooked, right? And you're like, well, what did, what did you miss? What did you miss that made everybody either either made everybody mad or made everybody disappointed. Expectations weren't managed, like you said, or they thought that it was going to be like one thing, right? You literally can run this thing. I mean, that's one of the great things in the bad things about KTV. You can run cat DV on a single Mac mini and you can, if you want to have a, I always say this, it's a very permissive dam for better or worse. So if you want to have a really bad idea, which is running it with no backup, right. You know, on a tiny machine that's, you know, an eight year old, you know, Mac or PC or something running with no backup and nobody at it even knows the thing is in the building. Speaker 1 12:48 You can do that. We would not recommend that anybody on this call. But, but that's the thing that we sort of try to stop you bump into and there's zero strategy, right? And Oh, by the way, there's 3 million assets in the database and the things for some reason, no privacy. No Brock says, yeah. Oh yeah. The other thing I want to bring up is what Ben and Jason and I ran into today was, no, we're talking a lot about the it side and the requirements gathering, but who's going to own this thing? Who's your stakeholder? Who's the stakeholder? Who's actually going to be responsible for the success of this thing? And that's a great one. Who's going to evangelize it internally and then the users to the people that are expected to use the thing? Who's going to say, guys, I know you have a go, Jason, we're just going to say, you know who's going to say, guys, I know this really seems like it's going to be more work, but you're just going to feel that initially it's going to be a little bit of pain at first. Speaker 1 13:44 You're going to see the value eventually and it won't even take that long. Right, right. And when we talk about automation, we can talk about tricking people into using the dams by giving them, you know, automation. Right. You know, like lose that term all the time. But I just also want to say that if you have a ghost ship out there, like if you have one of these rigs and it was done, like don't be embarrassed. It happens a lot. That's why we're doing this show because this, this happens so often and, and, and once more with feeling, I can tell you this right now has, you know, it has like a hundred percent success rate. I think we've actually been really successful at going back in because a lot of times, like you said, maybe your vendor wasn't even clear with you about that you, a lot of people got this thing and nobody told them this. Speaker 1 14:21 That's why we want to do this. You guys asked Jeremy and I what we wanted to do and the first thing we were, it's like, you know how not to buy a damn because we've seen it done incorrectly and that's not necessarily the fault of any one person or department. It can be a combination. As a matter of fact, the, the industry didn't even know at that point. We are not so, so it's not just KTV, right. There are other field dams out there or ma'ams and all of that. And really we were all discovering this together. The customer had a need, there were products and Speaker 2 14:52 They were sold in all in a phase one. And we all took our lumps and learned the process of how to actually do this. Right. So that's why when we say, you know, once more with feeling a hundred percent success rate because now we've done it once. Right, right, right. Speaker 1 15:06 Yeah. You should also mention that that part of that you, you bring up a great point. Going back to Dan, the difference between dam and ma'am damn traditionally meant a million dollars. You know, it was a seven figures and it was years and you got a bunch of dudes in suits from cognizant or whoever who came in and told you how to do it for 500 bucks an hour. And they lived with you for a long time. Right. You know, I joke, I moved out of storage into asset management and I kick myself every day. You would deliver like a storage system and you'd be like, you deploy it right and you're like, it's working. I'll see you guys later. Dust my hands off and I'm gone. I think we're in with customers for years, you know, we are and it can be a great relationship if everybody understands that, you know, um, and we don't want to scare anybody. Speaker 1 15:46 You can deploy one of these things pretty quickly if you want a simple phase. But ideally this becomes something that becomes so integral to your workflow that you need a relationship like Chesa provides where you're like, no, ongoing, we're going to, this thing is going to help us in some cases it's going to make us money, it's going to save us money. And that investment that we make is going to come back to us many times over. And that's one of the reasons we like you guys. I mean I'll just be straight about it. We have, we, we have certain resellers. You do a great job, you guys just, that does a great job. You don't leave, you know, it's great. You're there till, until everything's done and working and beyond. Serious. Appreciate it. Um, so, you know, real quick, if I may break some, talk a little bit about how, how Chessa at North shore kind of work together because we, you know, some people might think, well, you guys kind of do the same thing, right? Speaker 1 16:34 Yeah, I will. And by the way, you know, it's funny, it took a long time. I value, there's certain resellers that I work with that I absolutely, I use them as points of pride because I know that I had to earn them. Right? There's some West coast resellers, some Midwest we chose with Chesapeake. I had to earn it. And I appreciate that, uh, been going back years. I remember showing our first product, uh, you know, to people at Chesapeake and, and you guys have really watched us grow. And I, and I love the fact that actually our relationship has linear grown closer as North shore has grown bigger and more capable. And as the products came along. Uh, but you guys are super conservative, which is great. Like I literally joke all the time. I used to joke that I, I, I, I've said to my developers, they'd be like, well, we have this thing. Speaker 1 17:19 It's coming together and getting going. I'm like, guys, I'm going to have to prove this thing to Ben. Like I gotta prove to Ben that this thing works right. And I don't say that bad. I love that because for me, I'm the same way. I want to know it works. So, so, yeah. So, well, so a lot of resellers do not have a damn specialist. They can't, they're not, they're not scaled to the way to have that. You guys are actually really unusual in that you actually, we joke all the time. It's like you guys actually know exactly what's going on and we can give you direction and you can do it. Um, it is a unusual skillset. So Chesapeake evolved a lot like North shore where you have somebody who sort of learns cat DV and then maybe go, gosh, you know, it'd be great if we had some scripting people or maybe some developers to help out on certain things. Speaker 1 18:02 While this person's probably better on workflow design, this person can help with documentation or training. And we've developed that team now at North shore, you know, you don't get like, no sir doesn't do onsite deployments. And people always ask us why. And it's because, well you may have six people in your deployment and each of those people is great at this one part of it. And then you've got project managers looking over it and that's the same way the Chesa does it. Square box does it too. You go in the UK square box is like, yeah, you don't get like a dude doesn't show up or you know, a woman doesn't show up to do it. It's, it takes too much. So, so that's a big thing. And then the, you know, the real thing that's really kicked in, as you mentioned, the middleware. So making a damn do more than it does out of the box. Speaker 1 18:42 Right. And square box is wide open. So one of the reasons I think probably both of us liked it is that the APIs are really open. There was no data lock-in. You could get data in and out really well. And it was super flexible and it's modular. So our organization's crazy. I hate to interrupt you. Can you just take a minute please and and explain what do you mean by the API are very open. Cause I hear a lot of people saying that and I'm not sure all of our lists have an open API, right? Like I won't mention the vendor, but there's a, there's a major and nonlinear editing vendor that's like, we have an open media standard. You're like, really? Then why are you the only ones that read that and what it really means. It's so it's open if you want to be at our developer program and pay us, you know. Speaker 1 19:23 So anyway, but yeah, no, you're, that's a great point. Um, the thing that we loved about KTV when we started looking at it for me was that, um, a, you can fit it into a lot of workflows, but not only a lot of workflows, you can fit into a lot of infrastructures. So some dams, there's one server and you buy the server and it has the automation. You mentioned the workflow automation and all that. It has all that in one thing. Um, and then so caddy V has a server and these are separate applications and it has nodes that you can then automate with. And so you can add those nodes. You can have a server, they can be separate boxes. The nodes can literally be in different cities. So it's crazy sometimes how we, you know, built workflows really small and then their APIs are really open. Speaker 1 20:03 So you can use, uh, you know, XML to put data in and out. You have a rest API, they have a, uh, an original server API. They have command line tools. And so you can scale to a customer. So I know you guys did this a lot. You know, we joke about people being script kids, you know, so we, we, you know, we have script kids, we have developers. It's really great that like, you can have a tech onsite who could be like, you know, I'm just going to write a little shell script to do something and maybe that'll get you over the hump if the budget's small and then maybe six months later they go, you know, that script is great, but troubleshooting it's a little hard. You're like, yeah, you know, we should make that into an application. And you can linearly scale with complexity up to something like you mentioned middleware, like a North shore, you know, connector that might have a complete system and all this stuff in it. Speaker 1 20:48 That's a really complex app that, you know, really you could start as a shell script and go to a big thing. So for us, that's the thing. Um, and you can put a cat DV rig in and, uh, Jeremy's gonna shake his head. You can have a candy V raid that nobody sees and that's a weird idea. But we actually have cat DV rigs that are running automations and collecting data for people. They're not even ready to use that data yet, but they know they want to like capture it. Like Damien, like Jeremy was saying, capture the data for a while. We'll sometimes put an automation in that's like catching your outputs, maybe your masters and nobody's even ready to look at them yet, but they, but somebody in post is like, you know what, five years from now I'm going to be really glad that I did this. Speaker 1 21:31 So we, you know, we have those that are running with one or two users and they're just running, but they may have a gigantic automation, you know, so, so that's kind of the piece of that is that, you know, a lot of people's APIs are very difficult to work with. And as you guys well know, Chesapeake doing so many different dams, um, it, it, it makes a difference and it, it actually translates directly into cost. If an API or an SDK is expensive to work with or difficult, it will cost you more to develop a custom solution. Simple. Sure. Well, yeah. Yeah. So sales process, uh, Jeremy, anything on that? I mean, the only thing I was going to say is like if somebody pitches you, I do everything system with less than 30 minutes of discussion. Probably know that that's a guess. Right? You know, but, but again, if you just said to us right now, like I've had people, I had a guy call me one time from a reseller just yelling, literally yelling at me. Speaker 1 22:19 I just made a price. And so I was like, okay, well if you want to do these things, here's a phase one and here's a price. Right? But I would say that, be careful of that, right? Be careful of the rush to close, right? I mean, it sounds crazy. Don't be scared of, don't be scared of phases. You mentioned that some people are like, I literally had a guy go, my boss doesn't want to hear the word phase, because that usually means scope creep. Right? It usually means, Oh no, and we're not talking about that. I want to be clear that I think Chesapeake and, and all of us on this call are saying no, no, no defined phases with defined measurable outcomes. Yeah, absolutely. With reasonably defined, you know, budgets. So you know what you're getting into. But I think we could speed that into bed. Speaker 1 23:01 I want to ask you about this a little bit, but do you find that you, that humans need it phased probably the humans using the damn need that need things phased more than the deployment team or the technology, right? Like we could build a crazy rig, but the humans may need time to understand and absorb it, right? Very reasonable. Change management in user adoption. And Jason, you can probably drive that question because you're doing the implementations in this consultation. And this is, this is, this is really, this stretches throughout Imam deployment in my experience, which is, uh, we constantly are having these, these conversations about what, what can we do well, what can we do well, what do you want to do? What will the users do? What do you want to do? What do you want to do with this? But we don't know. Speaker 1 23:49 We need you to tell us what we're going to do. And it really is this sort of delicate dance of, uh, you know, of how are we going to get this done together? This is our thing that we're doing together. So it's, it's so, so all I can say is that's why this, this sort of initial discovery process and this consultation is so important because we have trouble telling you what you can do with the ma'am if we don't know what you're trying to do. Like, right. Jason, do you find that customers sometimes like, like, like a, like a manager who's not involved, you know, who's just a stakeholder watching it, they'll come back and they'll go, don't you guys know what to do? You know, and it's, you have to go, well yeah we do, but we also understand that we can, you know, you can lead a horse to water, right? Speaker 1 24:32 You can tell, I can tell your users what to do, but they may hate me for it. Right. And it may never work. Fitting the solution to them is a big deal. Looking at short term goals and long term goals. I think it's like you never, it's often almost like life coaching, you know, a life coach as well. I think this is a great time to bring up that wonderful little phrase that we talk about from time to time on the workflow show, which is workflow therapy. We consider ourselves therapists and this consultation is the ultimate workflow therapy to Jeremy this week. I literally, I own Tuesday, no Monday. I literally said to a customer, I said, what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to be when you grow up? And he was like, what? And what I was talking about is like, he had this idea for a workflow that I, you know, I was like, well, do you want that or does your company want that? Speaker 1 25:23 You know what I mean? Like, like, you know, like you said, Jason, will your users do this right? Like we can, a lot of times the boss is like, well, I want to do this. And I go, really? Because I don't think that your users are ready for that. You know, like I don't think, I think you know there too, but not, not like they don't know what they're doing but they're too busy. Right. They're like, well I want everyone to tag this with 50 pieces of metadata. Every asset. You're like, I don't know that that's going to happen. Right. Cause you're in the middle of, you know, whatever sports season or whatever you got. Right. So I think that's a big one is that day, like you said, the experience, it speaks to the experience of the people consulting, which a lot of people also hate that C word is that is it? Speaker 1 25:58 If you, if you can't, somebody can't head you off. If somebody is telling you that every idea is great, they're probably just B S and E. Right. Because it's like they might just be trying to sell these, you know, they need to be difficulty too. Sorry to cut you off there Bryce. No, no. Jump in. You have to cut me off. We've all talked to prison before. Get on a dude, jump in. It's a painful part of the presales process because if we're lucky and we've managed to talk to somebody about a presales, uh, consultation or discovery, um, and we've convinced them to pay for that beforehand, they've seen the value of it. They've probably dealt with this kind of change management process before. Um, so that makes the whole Speaker 3 26:44 Thing easier. However, um, often people have money at the end of the year. They're trying to spend that money. The person who's paying for the whole thing is in part of the team and doesn't really care about the workflow or cares adjacently to the workflow. So what I've found helpful too is if we can add some professional services, time to do the discovery is kind of phase one of the ma'am deployment, but kind of hedge our bets to say we've covered, um, you know, we know what the basics are. You want ingest, you want delivery, you want search, we're going to put together, um, specific custom metadata fields for you. You know, there's the base level of a phase one plus some additional discovery on top of that. That's usually how we can succeed in phase one. Absolutely, dude. Absolutely. Speaker 1 27:36 No, I, I completely agree. I, you know that it triggers something that, a question about, another thing about how not to buy a damn, uh, the, the check box at the end of the big phase. So Jeremy and I were just in San Diego together at a sports thing, and this happens in sports all the time because the budgets roll with like a, like a big control room upgrade or something. Right. And somebody will go out and buy like a petabyte of, of quantum storage or something, you know, some big sand and they buy a giant archive and they buy all this stuff and then, and then they add on a hanging on maybe a little bit of a wacky thing button phone here. They add on a dam as like a checkbox at the end. They're like, Oh, and I have some money left over. I'll throw a damn on there. Right? So everybody dumps this huge deployment off. The dollar menu literally is as if they did that. Exactly right. Speaker 1 28:28 And this is a $1 spicy chicken sandwich. Yeah, we, we, we exactly know it. Is it literally like that? You're like, yeah, I want fries with that. And then so the, the side order of dam that comes with this rig, right? Nobody cares. Like you guys were being and you guys were talking about like when nobody cares about it because by this point they're so fatigued, they've learned, they changed everything in their workflow. They've moved all their media and they're just like, dude, I don't even know. Yes. It was just brought up recently, the idea of the finder and I'm happy. Exactly right. We brought up the idea recently that we want to try to get like the, especially on these sports gigs, we were like, you know what I actually want you to, and they're also, we usually, by the way, then that industry, they're very rushing to get ready for the season, right? Speaker 1 29:10 So they literally finished the sand, like, you know, like a week before the season starts and they're like, here you go, guys get to work. And then everyone's off like, ah, I kind of have like a, you know, like whatever sport I'm doing, I gotta go look at, we've actually brought up the idea of asking when they do that, just to say like, Hey, um, do you want to just hold this budget with somebody in escrow? And then when the season's over we'll all talk, right? Because like, if you don't get this now, you shouldn't do it. And people think that's really crazy. But we're like, no, no, no. We'll deploy the hardware and software. Right. And get that running. So, you know, you got your stuff and every, you know, the boss can stamp it. Like, I got my stuff and you literally get like a gift card, you know, for the, for the consulting and the training because you're not going to listen to me right now and you're, you know, you don't care. And if you don't, I can't do my job. Right. Like my team cannot literally get, you know, we can't do our job. Speaker 2 30:00 Whereas if you do, we might be working the whole project on scope creep. Yeah. Right. Well that's, yeah, that's where everybody loses, right? That's where everybody loses money on the whole deal and all of that. So we, we call it, um, deployment through support, which is just horrible, you know, cause you're really just, you're just playing whack-a-mole at that point. You know, you've fixed this thing, you overcame this hurdle and the thing still doesn't work and whatever. Speaker 1 30:28 Yeah, that's a good point. So that, but that's one that comes up a lot. That one. Um, uh, can we, can we all talk about blind out RFPs for a minute? Can we, can we do that? Hopefully no one listening to this is like trying to do one right now because it's not going to make you happy. It's, spoiler alert. It won't make anyone happy. And, and you know, Speaker 0 30:48 Here's the thing, a lot of these, a lot of these platforms, all of these platforms really, it's this massive mixture of what is, what is software versus what is professional services versus what is configuration versus customization. You know, a platform like cat TV, there's, there's a, there's many different ways to skin the cat and the cat DV. So you, you can, you know, you can, Speaker 1 31:14 I know, man, you, by the way, that was Jeremy. That's like he's in our club now. So you know, Speaker 0 31:20 You've got, you've got, okay, so worker node has the ability to do all these crazy things at, at, at the very, very high level. If you're savvy, if you're a smart you, you, you're not afraid of, you know, poke them through some menus and, and maybe looking at a couple of graphs, uh, pretty easy to put together some pretty simple workflows. If you want to get a little bit crazier, you can do that. You, you gotta read a little bit more documentation, but you can do that. Then there's these just complete custom software development. You're talking about the JavaScript API and the plugin API and all that. And you know, these are things that, I mean, you kind of need to be a developer to be able to do, but some of them can be done inside the platform, right? As customization. You've got these JavaScripts calculation fields pleaser, those are actual like, you know, those are field types in the actual interface of cat DV that you kind of have to program to get them to do what you want. So you need to know a little bit of coding, but that's not necessarily middleware. Middleware is like, you know, this other application that sits off to the side to receive data and exchange it between, right. So it really is, it's a true leader, right? It's, it's a huge thing to wrangle and define and that's why it's always a conversation. It's, it's always an engagement. Speaker 2 32:34 Yeah. I in more and more as, as cat DV has scaled, well we'll just call it the company almost in a phase two at this point. Right? So we've overcome our phase one woes of what cat DB was, which was, you know, I think like a lot of memes. You, you, you kind of lived in that man world and you didn't talk outside of that world and it was your media asset management tool. What's on your saying? What's in your archive? How do you find it? Can I search it, all of that as we've moved into phase two, those things that you're discussing, connecting to all these different third party applications, other systems, other systems that have absolutely nothing to do with media or assets, uh, around an organization. That's where we're moving to now. And it always involves custom middleware, the software itself as well as development and integration. Speaker 0 33:30 That's right. Um, you know, one of the things we have been talking about in our, in our space of late is this AI machine learning. You know, all of these, all of these, uh, basic algorithms coming in and figuring out a bunch of things about our data for us. Right? And that's all middleware, that's all interactions with something out there that's analyzing all that data. But what do you want to do with it? I mean, you want to pull it back into the system of record, right? So you want to get that all back into your man. So yeah, it's, it's a really interesting, that's all middleware. Just like Jeremy said. Yeah. Speaker 1 34:04 In something. Going back to your point about the scaling of the system in there. Um, I've spoken, I've run into several people in the last few weeks. Um, there's something I want to watch out for, for managers. I want, I actually want to talk to the users and the managers in this. And, and I want to hear y'alls feedback on this from a manager standpoint, having a, I always joke, cause I'm probably older than anybody on the call, I was joking about having the smart kid. You got a smart kid on the system and a smart kid turned loose with cat. DV can do crazy good stuff, but you gotta be very careful because if that smart kid moves up and gets a new job or gets promoted <inaudible> I'm always like sorta like warning. So if I'm speaking to the manager, I'm like, Hey, you're very lucky you have a kid here who you don't pay any money who's done a quarter million dollars worth of work for you. Speaker 1 34:56 Right? But by the way, I was telling the kid, Hey, be careful because now you're trapped because you're the kid that did a quarter million dollars worth of work and they're never going to let you move up because you, you, you own that thing. And so this week I was talking to somebody and this kid's a genius and I was like, Hey man, um, Hey, I mentioned a price for something and he was a little bit of sticker shock and I was like, I said, I should tell you this, you know, I said, just as a, as a freelance at workflow therapist, I was like, do you understand like that you've done like several hundred thousand dollars worth of work on this rig that if you had someone outside do, this would be really expensive. So even if are lucky to have that unicorn who can do that, um, the question is, do you want them to do that? Speaker 1 35:42 Because I know that Chesapeake, I know that no ashore square box, we're going to document this stuff. We're going to have more than one person who knows it. You're going to have continuity, right. You know, you talked about the, you know, business continuity and, and then the other side of that is, is, is that really the best use of that person's time? Right. That's one that I was causing and it sounds selfish. It's like, well, you're just trying to get us to let you do the work. And it's like, no, if this person is a creative who knows your workflow, they should be doing their job. They shouldn't maybe be learning the worker node or whatever. Right. It's just get it done because if you do it right, you only do it once and then it just runs. So learn to troubleshoot it. But I'd love to hear in your experience like what, are there any nightmares, Ben or Jason, have you all run into places where they lost their smart kid or whatever happened, you know, like, like what do you run into out there with that stuff? Not just cat V but any damn Whetstone was that guy. Now he's got a pocket. Oh my God, you're kidding me. Like there's someone listening to this that is super mad. Speaker 0 36:38 <inaudible> exactly what stone, by the way, let me just tell you this. I'm, I'm a boy scout. I was, if I was a ruthless businessman, I would be hired in those kids left and right. Man, I know three of them right now and I'm like, I can't touch them. But if they ever get fired, they got a job forever. Right? That's right. That's right. Um, yeah. I, I mean, Speaker 1 37:11 Jason, do you want to apologize? Your former boss right now live on the air and what do you think somebody, it's a business thing. You said you got to let people move up. Right. You know, a good assistant editor will never become an editor because they, they know where all the media is. No one will let them leave that chair. Please don't. Please don't promote Sarah. She knows where everything is. Speaker 0 37:32 So sad. No, that's a really good point. But I will say that I feel like the media asset management initiative at, at my previous job was a great success. And it's not just because of my involvement as a big part of it too and still is actually. But, um, we also identified the need to bring on a new person into our team whose sole responsibility was to make sure that media got into cat DV in the right format with the right metadata, with all the right, you know, basically it was, we're not doing the wild West here, we're not doing, everybody has their little scratch space and you know, we're just going to trust that everybody does the right thing. It was, it's all got to go through this person, whether it's shot footage from a camera card, whether it's being acquired from a client, whether it's stock that we downloaded from some stock site. Speaker 0 38:17 It all goes through this one person. And that was a huge part of the success because he was great at doing and was very consistent and you know, just the ability to have all of that consistency right up front meant that nobody really had to worry about it at the end. You know, it was just, it was getting done. So the, the thing that I hear a, when we do these consultations as well, who's going to do that? Like, who's going to open up, say the verbatim lager in Canterbury and put the script in and line it up with Martin, Speaker 1 38:45 Who's going to do it? Is the producer going to do a job? It's a job, right? Speaker 0 38:48 Yeah. So it was, it was things like that. It was the sort of preparing the assets for the man so that we can go back in a year or maybe even next month and find the stuff that we did right. Because that's a huge part of it. The uh, the one question, uh, one of our senior engineers, uh, asks whenever somebody says, Hey, can we do this with a man? He says, who's doing that job now? Right? Yeah. Because someone has to understand at the end of the day, how does that work? What, what are the manual steps to get to that result? And that's how we define what the automation is going to do. Speaker 1 39:19 If a customer has great Manning of a customer refuses discovery. Like if we have a customer that refuses discovery, we go, cool. Then do it manually first. Right. If this is a new process that you don't do, then you do it manually for a while so that you understand all the edge cases, all the problems that we got to account for, and then we'll talk to you, right? But if you're not going to do discovery about this workflow and really get deep and sit down with, you know, someone like banner yourself and really drill in, then we're going to have to see it work because there's going to be someone like that, Sarah or whoever, mythical Sarah that's like, Oh yeah, when I do this, this happens all the time. Or Frank doesn't send me the right audio every time or whatever. You know? So Speaker 2 39:55 Yeah. One of the things also to be aware of, um, as you're doing discovery is identifying that curmudgeon in the room who has a secure position doing some crazy thing like rights management. Phil, what do you do for rights management? Phil? What's Phil do? Jeremy? No, no, no. Rights management Speaker 1 40:20 Man. Like, and, and knowing like, you know, like you said, well, or even more importantly, love it when somebody says, we're gonna deal with rights management. You go, cool, what do you do now? Like, Oh, we don't do that. And you're like, Whoa, then technology is not going to solve that problem. You have a basic misunderstanding of like what's going on, right? Yeah, yeah, Speaker 0 40:37 Yeah. Well, we, we have to, we have to make sure that we say, when you buy a ma'am, you're not buying a workflow, right? We consult with you on what your workflow currently is and see where we can apply the man to, or the wham or whatever it is to do that, to help you with that. But, um, the other thing I just want to highlight is this is more part of post-deployment, uh, ways that we can, you know, we can keep things in success. We mentioned, you know, making sure that we identify where we need to expand the team also. Uh, how do we circle back and, and make sure that in the organization that is, you know, in the actual client organization that's using the man that we are still meeting the needs of the current production. So we get together every week, every week, every two weeks, maybe every month. Speaker 0 41:20 And we talk through like how's it going? You had this project, it was a challenge. Tell me why it was a challenge. We have this series of things coming up that we need to prepare for in the, ma'am, how are we going to use the man as a hub of our media for that thing. It might be an exception to the rule. Is it going to be a more normal thing? Should we like expand on things? Should we bring in checks? Yes, exactly. Like regular just health checks on how things are going. Um, and then you'll have like some really impassioned people in the group that are going to have some great ideas and you're going to have some people that just don't want to use it, but it's, it's a good way to sort of gauge, you know, how's it going? Speaker 2 41:53 Well and, and the thing is, is, is I always say that the man is never going to be done. The man will go through 50 phases, right? So if you don't like the word phase, you're, you shouldn't be in the man business. Right. But the deal is these tools, especially the wham tools as you call them or as everyone calls them, I guess is, Speaker 1 42:11 I bet. I bet the way. I've never heard that term. So stoked. Chesapeake uses all the big words. I love them when I get on with the one that I can just make that up before we walked into this morning. You got to just try to like freak me out. I'm like, you know Jeremy, I remember the day when I knew I was old and that's when I was on the Chesapeake flow sheet. I have no idea what they were talking about. <inaudible> Georgia. Michael, by the way, you're dating me. Exactly. It's a wait before you go go. It's a chicken out here. We go. Well you, you've, you've hit though. Come on, you're hitting, you're getting close to that Speaker 2 43:05 Man. And I totally lost it. I so, so, uh, shit, what was I talking about? It was an E Speaker 1 43:12 A man is a living thing. That's what the human body <inaudible> Speaker 2 43:16 So you're go, you're going through all of these phases. Now these tools are, are meant to save you time and money, right? They are meant to do more with less, which in turn creates more bandwidth to do more, which creates more in theoretically or now you can do more volume so you can accept more shows so that the man will create a ripple effect inside of the organization and its processes to again, change processes in which the man has to, I have to adapt to those new processes. And the new business you're getting, you're going to acquire companies, you're going to be acquired, you're going to acquire customers, your customers are going to be acquired, you know, and that constantly affects the man, which then affects the business, which then affects the man. So all of this is kind of like a constantly evolving piece, right? Speaker 1 44:09 Yeah. Right. And, and by the way, Jeremy, do you know you handle biz dev development? I want to also say that not scare people. That doesn't always mean that it's a phase that involves you know, money. When you're saying there's phases, sometimes that's an internal phase that you yourself are doing. You know Jason, like you're saying where people now will say that a lot of companies don't have the initiative to do that and so they need to hire that in and that's something that we find a lot of times people are like, you know, we know we're not going to do this so let's just engage in his phase and do this. But yeah, exactly. Those are the things that name you guys are touching and certainly on something, so I want to, I got to jump in because my company is literally called North shore automation. Speaker 1 44:44 You're talking a little bit about automation here, right? Right. One thing I want to re respond to Jeremy, just like we're on a debate is the fact that you just mentioned like making more shows or whatever. And I want to call out, like you said, an envisioning that a lot of times a, a, some of our most successful workflows, far as automation are not about actually creating content. It's about delivering or sharing or you know, expanding that content outside. And so, you know, for instance, North shore, one of the North Shore's most, uh, one of our most successful customers is a customer that they not creating or not archiving, but they're actually ingesting and flipping and creating a million files a year and sending those out to over 250 outlets around the country. And so they process a million files. When we started with them, they processed 38,000 a year with a staff of four. Speaker 1 45:38 Last year they did 700,000 with the same staff of four. Awesome. You know, and, and then this year they're going to, they're breaking a million. And so our point of this is that you may find places that you could put a ma'am or an automated workflow in. And you know, going back to what I was saying earlier, maybe somebody isn't just trying to look for content in your team. I often joke that editors don't need a dam because they know where everything is. They made it. But the editor a year later might write the new editor, we'll need the dam and the organization needs the dam, right? So if you're looking for like, Oh gosh, where do we start? Well for me it's always like, well what's the most valuable stuff you own? Probably the master files. Get those in an archive. Jeremy, your acquisition thing. Speaker 1 46:21 People always fight me, I'll go, Hey, is there some way we could divide this up? And they're like, Oh no, we want one big archive. And I'm like, really? Because you make these, you know pieces and it seems like this business unit might someday get sold and somebody's going to ask you for that. Wouldn't it be cool just to give them like a hundred tapes instead of like going through and cherry picking it out of your folders. Right. I think that's a huge point you made there is that we, you want to be, you do want to be ready to uh, to be acquired or at the end of the day we, you know, I always joke, uh, at NAB it's like they always say content creators and I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're, yeah, everybody's a content creator. But the check doesn't clear until the contents delivered. Speaker 1 47:01 You can make, I got a friends in LA, I'm in Hollywood. People make a lot of movies. They don't get paid for them. People who I get paid are the people who deliver a show. Right. And, and so, so let us see. We should switch if we can for me, cause I know we're getting on time or run him. Uh, you know, we've talked a lot about like the like shoveling, what I call eating your vegetables. Let's talk a little bit now about like getting some dessert, which is having the thing do something for you, right? The have to have it do some of your jobs for you. I'll start by saying that I noticed in a lot of those small deployments we do where somebody is like, no, no, just get me a damn. Just get me started. You're like, great. Nobody cares because you, like you said, Jason, you've given people another job. Speaker 1 47:41 You haven't given them a benefit, right? Your company or your organization has a benefit. We know where everything is, but your users are like, dude, really, I got to do this. This is another step. Now you're going to the metadata later, right? Famous last words, right? Let's say that's my son. Can I go out and play now and I'll get to the room later? Of course. Yeah. So, so, okay, so you hit one right there. Perfect. So Jeremy and I have been doing this thing recently with a lot of people where, uh, a, you guys, you know, as you know, you do work flow therapy and you go, where's your metadata? And people go, we don't have any metadata. Of course you do. You have spreadsheets everywhere. You have job tickets, you have billing systems. You have a project management system. So what Jeremy was sort of alluding to with those connectors, we've been able to say, okay, like I'll give you one, a classic, uh, the, in a corporate communications department, they have a system that creates a project and it gets assigned to them. Speaker 1 48:37 And so they fill out a request and it's a work order and it says this is project ABC one, two, three, poof. Certain data about it. You can put that data into your ma'am with an API, you know, and then all the media that gets put into that little container has that metadata automatically. So get rid of the idea that you're, you know, like you said that your, your whiz kids are going to type everything. What if you just put the base metadata in by automation? Yeah, that's a thin thing, right? Like double data entry is just so painful to me. And I know that there, if the data has been entered once possibly by somebody who doesn't even know that there's quote unquote a video that's going to end up having that same data attached to it. It could be in the ERP system, it could be a CRM, it could be virtually anything. Speaker 1 49:26 Project management tool. If the data has already been entered, let's automate the process of getting that data into the relevant data into the ma'am yet. So let me give you a pull quote. We get people all the time, they're like, uh Hey, can, can we use AI? I'm like, maybe we should start with a spreadsheet. Maybe we can start with the data you already have before we go train a magic robot to do something. And that's the thing I say every time it's like they're there. It doesn't have to be intelligence. You're surrounded by the intelligence in your own building. You just don't know it's there. Right. Again, bringing it back to my son, we did this for a customer last year where they, they were doing books and everything, had an ISB in, you know how to book. And so we just took the feed that they sent to Amazon and tag it and put it in. And it's like nobody had to type data one number in and you get 40 fields of metadata. Right. Beautiful. What about your son? Oh, like you know, I got a transformer here, some Legos over here, video games over here. And he says, I'm bored. Right. Speaker 0 50:28 Well, you know what man took my, my uh, GI Joe's a can of gasoline and all I need is the match and then we're having a party, right? Yeah. My dad would always say boredom is for the weak minded. Right. So Bryson, I just heard you talking about like, Hey, here's some great things that we can do. Uh, how do you guys deal with, uh, we were told we could do this and yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm getting at? Speaker 1 50:55 We were told with you? Well we do, we look North shore automation built our name by making people mad because they would buy a dam that was deployed Academy system was deployed by somebody else and then they would see or be told what we did with KTV, right. With no discussion of scope or budget or anything. Right. And then there we go. I literally, I went, I got phoned in New York one time and sat in a room full of people and they said, well we were told that you do this. And I go, yes I do. But I did it with a team of six people and three months I didn't fly to New York alone and make it do that. Right. And that's one of the things that is sticky because you can buy a version of cat DV that's under 10 grand, but that doesn't mean it's going to do what a company who bought a quarter million dollar, you know, bespoke deployment does. Right. And so I think that's a big thing that it comes in again, that workflow therapy. Like can we be clear, you know, how easy and like you said, can you, can you, Speaker 0 51:53 Can you well, can you integrate or really make it clear what, what is good, better, best. Exactly. And I think I'm really good and I, analogies are great. I think, you know, the quintessential analogy here is the box of Legos. Like you go to whatever store you choose to buy your box of Lego's at and you look and there's a picture on the front. And you know, really that picture is just a suggestion. It's just like, Hey, here's what you can do with what's in this box. You can really do whatever you want with it, with the pieces that are included. But here's what you can do. And it comes with a guide that shows you step by step, by step on that. That's where it breaks apart a little bit is like, okay, so, um, what you can do isn't necessarily what you're going to get with that. With that set, right? You, you have to do some work. And somebody has to do that work, whether it's you or the integrator that you know, right? Yeah. So, Speaker 1 52:47 Yeah, I mean, well look man, they, they edited avatar with avid, right? Well, can I edit avatar with my avid? No, right. Have the skills of the team, right? That's the direct analogy in our business, right? He's like, do you have a horrible editor or you have a great editor and you know all that. So, you know, it's beautiful man. Speaker 0 53:05 Well is my favorite is one of my favorite analogies because everybody on board, everybody understands what Microsoft Excel is and what it does. But pretend, pretend you didn't pretend you didn't really know that much about Microsoft Excel and you had this job, you had to do that. Your boss came and said, Hey, I need you to take all this data and make some pretty charts for this meeting and a couple of days and you're, you know, maybe maybe you're talking your neighbor and you know, you're like, Oh, I just got this new thing I need to do by the end of the week. And he says, why don't you use Microsoft Excel? And then, you know, he shows you, he brings his laptop out and shows you like literally these charts I made with just with Microsoft Excel. And you're like, great, that's awesome. You go and you go to the app store, you buy Microsoft Excel and you're like, you open up your workbook in it, it does nothing. Do you know how many people I have heard say this man does nothing? Speaker 0 53:47 So, yeah, I mean, so you have to understand what is a cell, what's a row and a column and how should I organize? Here's the thing, how should I organize my data? When should I put it in a separate workbook or work or sheet or whatever. And, and, and when should I put calculations and, and what are those calculus booklet, calculus equations to me? Like, how do I, how do I make those work for me? Well, you might need to bring somebody in that understands all of that and can help you, you know, help you do that so you can make those charts. Speaker 2 54:13 Yeah, I, I've got another, I've got another analogy. And, and of course you do. If you play the course you do. If you play in the workflow show drinking game, then you're getting hammered right now. So Bryce Bryson's, uh, point was every time we come up with a bad analogy, you got to take a shot. So here we go. Uh, so, you know, I equate it a lot to, you know, software sales has kind of, we're, or enterprise software sales oftentimes have put us under this mentality that you pay X amount of dollars for a software seat and then you pay a maintenance charge, which keeps that software current and that maintenance charge, it's just a fraction of the cost of the software. The reality is, in a ma'am situation, it's more like a kitchen overhaul, right? So I had my kitchen redone recently and I didn't even know where to start. Speaker 2 55:02 So I started consulting. I sat with people to consult with them and I said the same thing that our customers say to us. He goes, what do you want to do with your kitchen? And I said, I don't, I don't know. Here's what I'm concerned about. I want to cook some food. Yeah, definitely. Definitely food put in a walking closet place that keeps things cold. Yeah. Well, so the deal is, is there was walls I wanted removed that impacted plumbing, that implant impacted electrical and all of that. Then I had to buy all this new stuff. I'm buying new countertops, new appliances and buying know the tile for the floor. The reality is is that the bill of materials that it took to make the kitchen was X dollars and the cost of discovery, demolition, implementation and deployment was that same dollar amount or twice that. So if the kitchen was costing me $5 for material, the total implementation was $15 because of the services around it. And you should expect that. You should expect that. Cause that in a lot of cases is what actually makes it sing. Yep. Preach on brother. Yeah. Speaker 0 56:17 Jeremy, have a question to that. Does this mean that you can now write off your kitchen remodel dude? Speaker 1 56:25 Is that why you did that? Was that actually discovery, uh, research for your, for your, um, I'm noting this now officially for the feds. So they, they, they, they call this up. You've, you got me on this, on all my paperwork as my accountant. So because that is a terrible, that is a terrifying statement. Um, so with that, I mean, I want to say that, you know, like we, we've talked a lot of doom and gloom, right? So, so let's, you know, we have, we talked about all my Lord, all of this can happen and that can happen and whatever and all the truth is, is that the reason we know this is because we've also done it right? Hundreds of times. You're talking to guys who've, who've helped hundreds of companies, organizations do these, do this the right way. We've seen people do it wrong. Speaker 1 57:09 And probably in the earlier days we even did it in, in, you know, we did some things wrong. But the point now is that, and by the way, Jeremy, I should pitch, I love the fact that you're so open and, and honest about, uh, about the cat DV stuff, about history, about the fact that it evolved, that it grew up in a way. Um, you know, the last few years of your product has been really, it's been inspirational to watch it cause it's, it's pretty, pretty solid these days. Pretty blows my mind. Um, but it will say that, that it can be easy to do this if you follow these sort of guidelines. And if you take your time and you do your homework. I, Jason, I love the fact that you stress how important the client is. It really is about the client. It's like, you know, you really got to have, it is so much of a mental game of, of a process and it's not like buying a thing. I think if anybody takes anything away, it's, if somebody tries to sell you a damn as a thing, they've probably never done this before. Speaker 0 58:04 Right, right, right, right. Or they're just trying to dump it on you and run, which isn't going to serve anybody, you know? Speaker 1 58:12 Yeah. So you buy something from people you like because you're, you know, it's a, it's a long relationship. Right. And you're going to talk to them a lot, so hopefully, you know, hopefully it's fun. Speaker 0 58:21 Yeah. All right. So we've spent a lot of time talking about how to sort of, you know, how to sort of discover how you want to bring a mammon to your organization. Let's talk a little bit about, uh, how for organizations that have already done that and did not have a good experience and are maybe now looking for their second damn or man because we're doing a lot of those projects right now. So, Speaker 1 58:43 Or to be fair also, uh, people who, who bought it a long time ago and it's time for technology upgrade, right? It might just be that it's an old thing, you know, Speaker 0 58:51 Or things that aren't really even ma'ams like deep archival systems that needed to be migrated off of that route and now they need to move that stuff off. So considerations, they're like, you know, one that I can think of immediately is how valuable is what we have in that ma'am, that we're trying to move off of. How valuable is it? I mean like how did we, are we migrating away from it because it wasn't working for us because it wasn't a great tool because just didn't Speaker 1 59:22 Meet with our expectations because you know, there's any number of reasons, but is the data in there even valuable right now? Right? Have things changed in your organization that much that it might just be better to, to, to, to nuke and pave and pay for build and save. Thank you. And even with that one, one of the other side of that, the other side is, even if you think it might be sometimes just having the data structured in any way. You know, we do these migrations from archive systems like Jeremy's talking about, and just the fact that the data's gathered in a single place, it has value, right? So we've had people be like, well, we're just going to go back and manually run the whole thing. And you're like, well, okay, you could, but you actually already sort of have a database. So you have a little bit of data. Speaker 1 00:07 And if you're talking about scale, if we're talking about hundreds of thousands to millions of objects, well even a little bit of data is probably worth getting, you know, in that way. But that's a big one. It's another reason that when you make a decision, uh, maybe we're pretty, you know, Joe North shore has a data liberation team. We joke about it because we have to get data out of some things sometimes that don't want us to take that data. Yes. We strongly believe, I know everybody on this podcast believes that the client owns their data. The vendor does not own their data. Right. And your data should be available to pack up and go at any time. Uh, you know, someone asked me what was funny, somebody asked me, you know, like, what's it like to migrate out of cat DV? And I'm like, well, you can do it right now if you want manually yourself. Speaker 1 00:47 You know what I mean? At any given moment, you can have every record yourself in a structured form. That's good. We also know people that make you pay to get your data back there or dams. And you need to ask them, there is a damn vendor that's tied to storage and to get your data back, do you have to pay them a fee for them to export because there is no export of that data? Um, and so with that, I think it's a big deal. But you're right. I mean, I think certainly in the workflow it's a great chance to go back and say, do we want to continue this path? You know, uh, you know, or do we want to do that? But then even then, what does it look like to go, you know, to leave, uh, time considerations. Uh, Ben, I know you're involved in some crazy migrations right now and people need to understand that even if it's all automated, it may have to run in the background for six months or a year, you know, so there's probably going to be exceptions. Speaker 1 01:39 It's probably gonna stop every once in a while and say, Oh, you know, here's this exception. Maybe it's a value that we didn't account for. Maybe there, maybe there's a ampersand in the file name and we didn't think about that possibility when we were writing the or Apple for letting us put emojis on our file names. Yeah. And so with that, that's, that is a great year triggering great things. There's a lot of people who were like, Oh, we're just going to do this. We hear that all the time. Oh, we're just going to do this. What do you, well, I've got a, I've got an editor just going, just going to do it in their spare time or whatever. First, the mythical spare time for anyone on any staff anywhere, right? Yeah. You're like, okay, I know you're lying when you said that. Right, right. Speaker 1 02:17 There are, you know, and then the second piece of that is like, okay, well what's that worth though? Right? Like you said, what's the data worth? But also what's the time worth of a human to do it? And there are times when somebody has a small rig and we'll be like, Jeremy will bring me a migration and I'll be like, uh, they can just do this. Right. This is a quick one, they can do a couple spreadsheet import, it's done. But there are times when you're like, you know, they're going to try to do this and maybe they ought to just get a crew because it's not just the human time. It's also just having it done. You know, like Jeremy, I shutter to think, but he, he could have done that kitchen renovation. It probably would, would've been terrifying, but, uh, you know, but, but, but yeah, and it would have taken two years or longer or whatever, but it would've gotten done. So you always kinda gotta look at that where you're like, okay, what is this? What is what, like you said, value of the data, but also value of the human time or the effort to do it, to just maybe let it show up. Speaker 2 03:07 Yeah. And you're right. If I, if I had done that, I mean, first off, I wouldn't have eaten three months instead of one month and that kitchen cost and, and, yeah, and the cost, you know, with that time I could be making more money to pay for the kitchen in the first place. Right? Yeah. So, um, yeah, recurrently right now though, you know, we're working on a rig with, uh, Bryson and his team. It's, it's a petabyte on LTO with an encrypted database and they just, you know, the coach customer thought like, well yeah, we'll have to get a guy to just restore this through this application tape by tape, by tape. And right now they're writing an entirely automated process of um, loading the tapes, pulling the data, proxying it, checking it in a cat DV, it happens. Yeah. Speaker 1 03:58 And then Jason, like you were saying, it'll be you something you check once a week, you know what I mean? For a few minutes instead of you do it every day and run a bunch of tapes and then process. It's just like, no, it isn't running the ads running good, keep going. You know? So those kinds of things are big in that Speaker 0 04:13 About feature parody across different platforms. Because I know, we know, we've seen, we've seen certainly consultations with clients where they're like, yeah, we're, we're, we have this ma'am. And like, you know, it might be the situation, like you mentioned Bryson, where it was like a kind of a check box at the end of a big project sort of thing. So they have it and they've played around with it and they've done some stuff with them and like, yeah, it's not really working for us. Uh, maybe it wasn't deployed right. Whatever the reason is. But uh, they, they still have used it long enough to have a sense of what the feature set is and the expectation is this is a, ma'am, that's a, ma'am, I should be getting the same features. And it's not really a consideration of like, well, maybe the paradigms are a little bit different in this platform, this new platform. Maybe they're better, maybe they're more suited for you. But getting out of that mentality of how that other system works and into the, into this mentality of how the new system works can be a little challenging as well. Right? Speaker 1 05:07 Yeah, absolutely. You, you get comfortable with something. Right. And so having an open mind is a huge thing. Right. And I don't say that because it was like, Oh well this, this feature is missing or whatever. Even if the feeds, like you said, the feature, the funny thing is is time changes. I want to ask, do you find that video people, I have a term that I call the cranky old video guy, of which I probably am one now officially, but do you find that the cranky old video guy, and I say that because it just seems to be more of a male thing. It's literally, I find, I hate to say this, but it's like I, you know, I tend to find it's really, it's like if there's a really a prototype of a guy who's been in the machine room for way too long for his career, but do you find that they get locked into a workflow and they're like, this is the workflow, right? Speaker 1 05:49 This is the worst. And of course we see it. I love it. Now this is what's really funny. Think about this. When, when most of us started in this business, that was some sort of physical media and everyone was like, this is how we do it forever. Yeah. And then we went tapeless I, everyone was like, okay, well there's going to be a new way. And now everyone's like locked into these same ideas. And it's like, dude, we only did this lesson 10 years ago, so you can't tell me. This is how it's always gotta be. So that, that feature parody thing you're talking about. Yeah, man, even process parody, right? Like are we really doing this the right way? Do you really understand object storage? Don't be scared to say you don't because all of us didn't at one point, do you understand what's possible with automation? Speaker 1 06:33 We get people all the time who were locked into an idea it features or workflow and they will fight me to the death. And I'm like, well, maybe if you just look at this, right? Like I maybe we could save you, you know, four hours a day. You know what I mean? Just by doing something slightly differently. So I will say, yeah man, I think that what you're pointing do for me that I hear is open-mindedness. Sure. Because, because that's the idea is like, is it, you know, and it doesn't even mean to like us, me, whoever it means just in general to the industry. Can you look around and see what other people are doing? Are you willing or are you absolutely. If you're absolutely convinced that what you're doing is right. Okay. W okay, you're writing the check, but know that that might not be as good. Speaker 1 07:15 Just like Jeremy probably got a suggestion on his countertop or something or an appliance in that kitchen that probably saved him money and works better, but you might not have known that you can get a dishwasher where you don't have to scrape the plates anymore or whatever, you know? You know, I blew my mind. By the way. The first time I saw that, I was like, you don't have to wash the dishes before washing the dishes and do to go see it. I live in a world where I literally right now could, I'm going to send this recording off to get transcribed by a magic AI and I was blown away by the fact of not having to scrape a dish. When you buy a dishwasher that just shows your layers of expertise and your blind spots, which we all have, right? Yeah. I'm going to need this ability to be able to sort of step back and look at the bigger picture and say, okay, I understand, I understand what you're saying, but what are you ultimately trying to achieve here? Let's maybe like have an open mind about how to approach that. Right? Especially like some of these digital media companies who literally went from zero to a hundred million dollar organizations by Speaker 2 08:16 Uploading videos to YouTube and uploading videos to Facebook and all of that, and to tell them that they don't have, like, you don't have to log in anymore and you don't have to prep the metadata and you don't have to upload the video and you don't have to. It's a huge challenge, I think for folks who, who grow so fast like that, who might be good content creators, but they're not business people. They don't know how to run a massively expanding organization. Yeah. And it's hard because look man, I made him a hundred million dollar company doing this, so don't come in here and tell me that I don't have to do it this way. This is what made the million dollar. Yeah. Speaker 1 08:54 But yeah, but if you look at it, you're like, well yeah, but Wells Fargo also used to have everything on paper, right. Everything was manual and that's the way it was. You know, there's a point, you know, it's funny people a question, my favorite thing is people question, we have like these, you know, we'll do these distribution jobs, right? Where you're, you're creating an automation to send a file somewhere and somebody will be like, well, why do you do that? And you're like, well, how many do you day? And they're like, we upload two videos a day. You're like, yeah, well you're not looking at this, right. That's not you. But we have customers who upload 250 videos a day. And if you go, yeah, yeah, I know it only takes me five minutes. You're like, that's cool. Like how many minutes a day are you going to spend uploading 250 files? Speaker 1 09:31 Right? And, and the accuracy and all that. So there is a weird question there where you're talking about scale where you're like, like you said, every now and then stop. You know, Jason, I love that you know, you and Ben both like you have this concept of, of guiding your customers to this idea. Like, Hey, can we all just have a meeting and talk for a minute and blue sky in plain English about what the outcome is? Right? And the pain point. Can we just stop now? Cause I know we've done it like this for two years or six months or whatever, but could we stop and look at it again? You know, um, I'm undergoing that right now just to blow Jeremy's horn a little bit more here. I'm going to go in that right now because there've been so many features added to cat DV that workflows we built literally a year or two ago now could be modified and be better. Right. And so, you know, like, like it's really funny, we're all sitting here, you know, talking about the worker node. Worker eight is going to make us literally have to revisit everything we ever did because there's certain key features that are just like, Oh, we used to have to do this and now we don't, or now we can do that. Who's going to pay for that? Speaker 1 10:33 And again, you say, can you say like, I've got a customer right now that like I'm going to change all of his workflows on this really complex, painful workflow, but he, he knows that every, right now he spends about an hour a day. Um, it's, it's, it's hard to say he spends about an hour a day correcting mistakes that were made by his users that the worker node in its current version was not able to backstop against, you know what I mean? It wasn't able to prevent because it lacked this certain feature. Now we have this feature that can stop things, you know, from doing. And so, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's like the, the analogy of like, you know the carpet on the brig roll and it rolls out onto the, and it all goes on the floor cause nothing knows it's spooling. And so this guy is like, Oh wait a minute. You know, he's an executive. He's like, I have an executive, but he's a, he's a director level pretty high. He's like, yeah, Speaker 0 11:22 I'm sorry. I used to work, I used to work at home Depot in the electrical department, which was right next to the carpet machine. So yes. Do you know how many times I have people that come up to me and said, Hey, I need to get some carpet. Can you cut it for me? And exactly what you just described because it's not something you know very much about helping people. Home Depot was all about like, you don't, you don't say, well let me go get somebody to help you. You know, I'm trying to help them. If you can. So yeah, that, that same thing happened to me many times. Speaker 1 11:52 Life doing that. And I'm like, Oh yeah, by the way, like I literally got a S you got a message from square box. And I was like, Oh, well that actually just saves this guy an hour a day. You know what I mean? So all of a sudden he's like, Oh yeah, I get five hours a week back, do it right now. And so you, I mean, you know, but I mean, but those are the things that I think that, like you said, it's kind of, we're all talking to this whole thing is sort of about like the value of time, the, you know, the human interaction of that and, and open-mindedness. I think it all comes down to just sort of these plain English outcomes. Can you articulate to us in plain English outcomes and give them to us and give everybody the time to actually then, you know, think about those and what's the best way, cost effectively and efficiently to, you know, to deliver those outcomes in a successful way. Uh, and, and over time maybe, maybe you don't get all outcomes day one because of budget or, or just human understanding. But yeah, I mean I think that at the end of the day, it's, I think what we're laying out here is this a lot more human process than anybody would think. It's probably the most human involved process other than like an editorial workflow, which is the best analogy I could give. Speaker 2 12:57 Yeah. But, but, but when you get it right, it works for all, all entities, different departments, the stakeholders across the entire organization are served by this when it's done right. Absolutely. Speaker 1 13:14 Jeremy, think about, they think about the automation client. Let's call back to the automation client. I said that you used to do 38,000 files with one. You know, I, by our calculation this year with that same staff of four, they will do 17 years of work worth of work in one year worth of work in their two of their 2015 before we started, right? 2015 they did this. They do that understand the cost and the money they will make or save from that of doing 17 years work in one year. That's the kind of success story that we're all here dreaming of. Right. It great if you can double, but I personally myself have have been on a project that that brought 17 times the, you know the output. That's my guess. My guess is that right? Speaker 0 13:59 This is not one of those clients that called you pounding on the desk saying I need you to give me the price on a man right now. Speaker 1 14:06 Well I'll tell you this. This is really funny actually. It's beautiful. You mentioned that too. You're setting me up so well. We got in trouble from the reseller for not giving the number, the competing damn gave the number a week later and what they did is they gave a high number and two years to complete and we took three weeks to put it together and we gave them a lower number for the next six months and then we stretched out and explained that two years to them. And now here I am sitting four years later after that with a customer who has had outrageous success, we now work for them in so many other areas of their business doing custom code because of the success of their cat DV project. And we absolutely know pipe and smoke it. Speaker 1 14:54 But they, but you're right. No, they knew that. But I love it because like I said, the recent one learned a lesson that rep never, he was really funny. That rep never questions me again. And uh, and you know, and, and the customer actually said when they came back, they said, we, we know who these are is a giant company. So they, they didn't, this wasn't their first rodeo. Right? So they were like, they're like, by the way, we understood that you guys actually listened and paid attention because you send us back a document that said, Hey, here's what we're going to do in the next six months and we're not going to promise you the dream and hit you. And so it's funny, we ended up now spending, I think we're almost double what that initial other dams budget was. But it's been over several years and it's proven value at every turn. Speaker 1 15:31 So it wasn't a price thing that we beat them on. It was just a clarity. But uh, but I will say, yeah, I was super lucky because, you know what, like I said, we got, we were, we were really getting heat for that, but it's a great case. But again, you can't do all the things and the life coach isn't going to say, you know, move to Hawaii, you know, take up ballet classes and then start doing woodwork and surf. Right. Do all that in one day. It comes back to the idea that, but it can't be done and the outcomes can be great, you know? Speaker 0 16:01 Yeah, yeah. Ben just said love. It comes back to the idea that moms are living, breathing things. If anybody missed that, right. They have all such a hip more than, well maybe bit, I can see Ben Ben like opens his mouth four times and these things and everything he says is just insanely intelligent. Absolutely. Ambling making jokes. Ben just shows up and slays me. Ben's like Apple. He kind of like waits for the right opportunity and then he comes out with this like really awesome jam and everybody's just like, wow. Yeah. Yeah. I'm the diamond Rio MP3 player of this conversation. Speaker 0 16:42 That's awesome. Two Ben's iPod. Well listeners, you heard it from Bryson Jones, founder and CIO of North shore automation. Thank you for your time today, Bryson. Thank you. This is literally the highlight of my day. This is a blast. Thank you. Thank you. Also to Jeremy Streetman, VP of business development with square box. Thanks Jeremy. Anytime I could be with you guys. So that brings us to the end of our, of our episode today. Uh, hopefully we've you with how to buy a damn, ma'am, wham, Pam, whatever you're looking at, and maybe some little tidbits of knowledge about how not to thank you for listening. If you have any further questions, we would love to address them. And you can email us at podcast at <inaudible> dot com or visit us at www dot <inaudible> dot com and I all went to give us very special thank you to my cohost, Ben Kilburg, senior solutions architect here at Chesa. I'm Jason Whetstone, senior workflow engineer at Chesa and we thank you for listening. This is the workflow show.