Speaker 0 00:00 Hello, welcome to the workflow show. This is Nick gold and you're with us for episode four Oh three, the return of Dave clack from square box UK. I Dave, how's it going? It's going well. And we have, of course, our cohost Jason Whetstone, one of our workflow architect and engineers who helps us with this program and is also a pretty much the most expert guy on our team when it comes to the inner workings of cat DV. Thank you Nick. Yeah, you've delved the inner sanctums. Jason, you can keep, you can keep Dave real today. So we're actually recording out of a, well, I won't call it our Baltimore headquarters, I'll call it our Baltimore HQ annex, which is also, uh, our producer Ben Kilburg house. And we have the luxury of all of his audio recording equipment that he keeps here. So we're going to be doing our episode today out of that joint and we're thrilled to have Dave back through Baltimore on your adventures across the globe, right Dave?
Speaker 0 01:03 Absolutely. Another trip, another trip around the planet in 180 days. So Dave, we had you on closer to the beginning of your tenure as the chief executive officer of square box. Um, gosh, it was several years ago now and you've been in this role with square box for how long now? So I think I'm getting on for four years. So, and I think I would love to hear about too. I go, I think that sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. Granted the world just spins and you know, who knows what's happening on a given day. Was that last month or two years ago? Who knows? But it's been a little while since we visited and you know, as we get back into our regular production schedule of the workflow show now that hopefully our listeners have seen our new website that kind of looks a lot more like a real website and we have a new logo that isn't essentially a roar shack test into the psyches of our clients.
Speaker 0 01:59 That sort of was a cathedral. You know, I was starting to like it more that now that we saw the <inaudible> in the old logo and as opposed to the blue flame or would it out of the squished cockroach? It was okay. It was one of the 427th person identified. Our logo is looking like a squished cockroach. I knew we needed a change. Hey, the new one's looking good. You know the thing is what our colleague gang sign and if it is, maybe we need to think through whether blue is the right one for us. But anyway, we've moved beyond, you know, we, we've got a new logo and a, you know, even maybe the old one at least at keynoted that we squished bugs. Ha ha. Sorry.
Speaker 0 02:39 Dave's first reaction on the show is uh, grown of course. So I wish we could all see him over here. I know he's like wiggling around out really 2000 miles for this guy. He's like, I could have Skyped him. So anyway, we have a new look now that that's back up now that we actually are a little prouder of having our clients visit our website and you know, there's going to be much more regularly updated content. The biggest vehicle to that is the workflow show. We love producing it, you know, Jason, myself and Ben of course, uh, in production here. Um, and occasionally piping in. I like, I liken Ben to, to Robin on the Howard stern show every once in a while. See, there he is. Um, it's great to have you back Dave, because I feel like, you know, on many levels, cat DV and square box are part of a big cycle to us at Chesapeake systems.
Speaker 0 03:31 As we, as we have endeavored in this realm of media asset management and throw in several other buzzwords like production, asset management and workflow automation and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You guys, in many ways, we're kind of the beginning for us into these endeavors. When I first met Rolfe, uh, you know, in a much earlier phase of <inaudible> development, gosh, probably a decade ago. And back then like those words didn't have like real, real world meanings at that point. Cause obviously you would have somehow come up with a way to insert the phrase man into cat DV if you were coming up with it today. Right, right. Well, yeah I think yeah, these days we really don't have to explain to people what we are and that is quite nice really. So this is a really interesting thing and it's, it's, you know, again, I say that our involvement with you guys is in some ways CIC is cyclical in that you were one of the very first, for lack of a better term ma'am or production asset management software vendors that we ever did any work with.
Speaker 0 04:33 Uh, heck, even before our involvement with Apple spinal cut server, you guys were really the first to the party as far as we were concerned. Uh, we, we ourselves started to really familiarize ourselves with this idea of using databases as a way to organize things for video folks really through cat DV, um, and beginning to get people to catalog their video assets with metadata. These things that were now files and not tape sitting on a shelf. And I think, you know, you could say we reinvested with square box, Oh gosh, probably going back five years now as as cat DVDs development really progressed and the capabilities of the software grew, we started to invest more of our resources via the types of activities that Jason here has been very involved with directly over the years of integrating with other solutions coming up with true workflows and automation, tying it to archive software and making cat DV the front end, not only to people's kind of production system but also the front end to their archives and the driver for a lot of their overall workflow automation needs.
Speaker 0 05:39 And I feel like in the last two year to two years, we've kind of come back again and we ourselves are now even bringing cat TV to some of our clients. In a broader set of use cases spanning geographic locations. I'm starting to hit other types of users other than the editors or the graphics people. Um, and so now that you're back here, let's, let's take this opportunity if you will. Um, you've been in this role for a couple of years now. Well more than a couple of years. We've seen a lot of the same type of change as well that I think you're noticing, which is we don't even have to really necessarily define what this technology means and even the most base way. So I'd be curious, relate this back to some of your experiences as you took on this role of, you know, square boxes, CEO coming in from different industries and technological in nature to be sure, but different types of needs and workflows really as different as you could get, I think to media production. I'd be curious to hear you relate a little bit more how things have changed for you and for square box as you go into customer environments. What's really different now? So they know what the technology is, but illustrate this for us. Give, give us some examples of how the nature of these conversations has changed just in the last few years.
Speaker 1 07:03 Yeah, sure. And I think it is worth kind of taking a bit of a step back too because it is absolutely true to say that we were and are the industry pioneers. So cat DV has been in the market for more than 15 years already. And so we've been through several reinventions I think as the market has matured. And by matured, I guess I probably mean that in the early days there was no market. You know, it was a zero billion dollar industry for quite some time during cat DVS existence. Um, and so, you know, we've been through the whole thing of trying to explain what file-based workflows actually are. Um, trying to explain that when you buy your sand, maybe just having that storage isn't quite enough and ultimately you'll fill up and then you kind of get the shaking heads to a few years later.
Speaker 1 07:52 That stuff is full up. And then, um, we winding to, to just this week. Then I found myself in a meeting this week being, um, almost lectured by a prospect about the very hard line between Pam and ma'am, uh, that we don't actually draw, particularly with cat DV. We just try, try to provide useful tools that you can deploy however you like, you know, and some people might call some of those features, Pam, some might call them down so I might call them ma'am, whatever. Uh, and so the industry has completely moved on from us having to explain why our product exists right through to customers and prospects telling me their problems in, in, in vocabulary that I'm not quite up with myself yet. So, you know, the funny thing that I've noticed, notice
Speaker 0 08:35 This a lot, right? Because we have been ourselves I think very active in, in these types of technologies. And you know, on some levels you can look at the quote unquote digital asset management market and say, well this is older than the more video century command market. You know, publishers, people who are more text oriented, imagery oriented, graphics oriented have been using analogous technologies for a little longer than the video folks have. Maybe in some cases even by 10 15 plus years. And they, the folks who are kind of of this space maybe because they came to it as consultants through digital asset management, that kind of big picture brought us to umbrella kind of way of looking at these technologies. They tend to get very hung up on semantics and I think like you, we've learned that whether it's digital asset management, media asset management, production asset management, at the end of the day there are connotations to these different terminologies and it's great to see that the customers themselves, it is a funny one 80 where they wouldn't have known any of these terms five years ago maybe.
Speaker 0 09:47 And now they're lecturing us on, Oh no, you call yourself this. But really I think you're more of that. And we sit back and laugh cause I don't think to us it's as important is what little outline, what little box or playpen someone wants to put a particular technology in. We silo they're thinking of at the moment. It is a very siloed set of approaches. And to us, you know, the way I've always described it is there's kind of two things we're bringing to the table guys. We're bringing database technology on one hand, especially shared multi-user database technology and we're bringing software automation tools and whether you want to call yourself a damn, uh ma'am, Pam, granted there again there could be different emphases of that terminology, but what we're really talking about here are using databases, using software automation technology, taking a broader look at organizational or departmental workflows and seeing how does the availability of database and software automation tools make workflow more efficient.
Speaker 1 11:00 Yeah. And just to kind of cut across, I think so I think there's a third thing that we bring and you're really alluding to that and its workflow. So, so square box, I think we have a great set of tools, but it is, we've seen to our support team that it's possible to deploy even cat DV in a pretty messed up kind of way if you don't understand workflow. And so yeah. So we make some great tools that can be deployed in a really cool set of ways. But the reason that we deal through partners like Chesapeake is because you really understand workflow. We didn't pay him for that plug. Well, so we're just taking him out to dinner later. You know, whenever I do these trips, uh, it's all about workflow and it's absolutely right. So I said to my team years ago now, I said, look, I don't want anyone to not buy cat DV because we don't work with their favorite flavor stuff. You know, if a customer says, we have great coffee machine that
Speaker 0 11:54 We want to have integrated with cat DV, then I'd want to integrate with that so that they can have their workflow and have great coffee. The next question should be, give me its API guide. Right, right, exactly. Does the, does the toaster and the coffee maker have an API? If so, we're happy to kick off making a cup of coffee when I'm doing a bulk ingest. There's the documentation for that API. And is it easy to understand? Well, if not, you kind of don't have one. Well. Exactly, but here's the thing, right? One of the things I'm observing, I'm observing, you know, again in the last three to five years and the shift that's going on is we don't have to really educate customers as much on why it might be nice to make software platforms that are maybe in use for various parts of their operation.
Speaker 0 12:41 Some of it is used for planning, productions, planning shoots, coordinating, you know, logistics and personnel and camera gear and budgets and all of these things. Right. You know, there's no reason not to kind of think of all of that as part of your workflow. And you may have some systems that help manage those types of processes and we're not necessarily trying to scrap those and throw them away. We want to understand those. And you know, we, we obviously need to understand what your creative workflows are. Like what are the particular applications you use, how might we augment certain things that are currently getting bottlenecked in your workflow, you know, and then, you know, how do we tie into these other systems that, you know, we call more downstream from your production users. I just want to take a step, a really quick step back for a second.
Speaker 0 13:28 Um, a conversation that I've had with one of our other engineers here is, um, when you buy cat DV or you know, insert ma'am name here, you're not buying a workflow that would be cat DV. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But you're not buying a workflow. The workflow kind of needs to be, you know, be. Yeah. There needs to be a workflow defined and this is another change that I've noticed. I mean, even in our, in our own organization internally over the last really eight to 10 years, we've been even peripherally involved in this type of technology. I think to us conceptually, when we used to sell these types of software packages and we knew they allowed for a variety of different types of workflows. I think when we ourselves were first beginning to experiment with them, we sort of assumed the clients knew enough about their environments, knew enough about their backend technology and kind of knew enough about how to analyze it based rich media workflows that we could kind of give them this set of tools that had multiple possibilities inherent to it.
Speaker 0 14:35 And it's kind of lead them to come up with what the actual workflows are. It's not totally unreasonable because you look at a product like, like Excel for example. This is, this is an analogy that I use a lot. I mean, anybody can buy Excel and it's a tool, you know, if you buy Excel and use it as a tool, does that mean that you can create all of these crazy, you know, wonderful spreadsheets with all these calculations and all that stuff? Well, yeah, you can, but do you have the, the skills that it takes to, to get to that point, and this is L is really a pretty universal product that you can take courses and to teach you how to do these kinds of things. But because you know, media asset management is, is kind of a, you know, a streamlined thing, it really takes a, um, a special set of skills and a special type of a brain to really wrap your head around all that.
Speaker 0 15:23 And I think this is what we've noticed is that we can't just put the tech in that allows for various workflows and expect efficient workflows to somehow emerge, right? So we've had to become very involved in the process of not only marrying the technology to the users, but evaluating the environment, understanding what their bottlenecks are, understanding what are the workflows that are always going to be their workflows because it's the work they need to get done to do their jobs, but then break it into a set of, you know, segments. We'll really look at the workflow process itself, where it touches people, where it touches computers, where it touches particular software applications, how it involves people collaborating together, human to human, but media mediated via technology. And we have to come in and make that evaluation and our recommendations and how specifically we are going to deploy a tool like cat DV.
Speaker 0 16:23 And an environment and actually make sure that the clients know it's not just that you're going to have cat DV and it's can do this stuff. We're going to make sure that it's set up in a way where it is actively on day one making some aspect of your workflow, several aspects of your workflow more efficient, but you can't just deploy the technology and suddenly you have an efficient workflow. It's, we have to make the technology map onto or graft onto the workflows and augment them and make them better. But we can't just deploy it without having that understanding. And I think you're probably seeing that the clients are getting to understand these notions about their own environments better in the last few years.
Speaker 1 17:07 Right. And, um, and I think it says a few points to make on that. So I think, um, we certainly agree in now if I look back compared to a couple of years ago, we have some pretty sophisticated documentation and templates and a process that we help customers, um, to kind of step through in order to design a good workflow. And we don't just consider asset management because you have to consider, um, from shoot content creation to screen wherever that screen might be, how that content is secured, whether it be on a, uh, tape archive or uh, uh, cloud based archive and then how that staff is searched and we used. Um, and so that process is really important and I think we've got better as an organization over the last few years, uh, leading our customers through that design. And I know that you guys again, have evolved in your thinking here and, and it doesn't just stop there because we often find, um, that when folks have had asset management through a year or two, then suddenly their eyes are opened to what's possible.
Speaker 1 18:08 And whether that's a, you know, automation or media workflow, logistics staff or using cat DV to, to share and unlock the value of their content throughout a wider group of people either inside or outside the organization or perhaps using cat DV as a tracking tool in their production process. Then just having a system for a few years really just gives you the vocabulary to think about how that workflow can work best for you and so it's not a one stop one hit shop. You know you don't go in and do the design that's going to be it forevermore. You have to keep coming back and saying, what can we do to make this better? You're using it using a
Speaker 0 18:43 Term that is one that I'm going to steal from you because it's a fantastic way of getting people to understand what all of this looks like. You have to design a workflow. You might know what your tools are. This is my storage, this is my archive. These are my various groups of people who are part of this department. You know, this is what these guys do. This is what the editor does. This is what the producer does. We have all this stuff. We use premier and we have cat DV, but just throwing all those things together and saying, this is what we have isn't the solution workflow. You have to design a workflow. There has to be an analysis, there has to be intentionality, there has to be consensus building amongst the people who are kind of are the human ends of this workflow. And it's that design process that frankly, you know, it took us a years to figure out, uh, you know, what the best way of kind of ushering that process through from the very first conversation about quote unquote meta asset management or workflow automation through to an executed project is, but you know, I know to us at Chesapeake right now, I'm surrounded by many people who are vastly more creative and skilled than myself at Chesapeake.
Speaker 0 20:01 I, you know, mr Whetstone here is an amazing singer and musician and audio recording producer as is Ben. Ben is an amazing guitarist and recording artist and you know, technician when it comes to audio workflow. And these are things that a lot of our staff are very passionate about creatively separate from our day to day lives. But one of the things I think that's interesting about the way that we approach this is we know that many of the people who are going to have to utilize these tools and you know kind of become the human parts of these workflows that we may be changing and adapting somewhat through technology and automation. These people are typically very creative. It's something we have to remind a lot of our vendors sometimes when they're designing user and they're like, why just don't these video editors like my gooey?
Speaker 0 20:51 And it's like guys, you have to understand, artists are using these tools every day. They do amazing things with audio, video, photo graphics. They can invent nothing out of pure fantasy and put it on a screen. And so they have some very specific ideas about the aesthetic side of workflow and what's a good process. But you know, as we design the workflows that have to balance what the technologies are capable of on one hand, and frankly they can be very, in some ways disruptive to the workflows that existed before. It's not necessarily putting anyone out of a job, but it might be changing their job. I like to think it frees them up to spend more of their creative juices on actual creative things and not waiting for a little progress bar across the screen cause we've automated some of that away. But when we design these workflows and we know that it's these highly creative people that are having to interact with them, I think what we've developed at Chesapeake is an approach that we see the workflow design process as it relates to digital creatives as a very creative process in and of itself.
Speaker 0 21:59 And I know for me who maybe I'm not as skilled as mine, my colleagues here at actually producing media and doing something great with it. But I know for me it's a very creative zone that I enter into when I'm trying to figure out how does the, how do these pieces of technology, again, kind of map onto the highly creative and you know, sometimes highly interesting. Some might say, you know, uh, you know, just unique sets of personalities who can create amazing video and audio and, and graphics. And what have you, and understanding like how are these, how has the technology and the human touchpoint going to interact in a way that actually makes everything better for everybody? I think we really look at that even as a creative process, but someone just selling you the software and the storage or whatever, like you don't have a workflow because of that.
Speaker 0 22:48 And Jason, that's just a great point. You and you as well did you have to design it and you design things out of a set of tools but they're not inherent. Right. And I'll give you an, it's like, it's almost like saying a pencil is a sketch. Exactly. Think about the sketch with the pencil and I'd be curious to get your insight on the stage because I imagine that this is an aspect of your own thinking that's evolved the more years you've been involved, day to day with this type of stuff with square box and cat V I know that for us or specially for even myself and I put this out there widely, you know I used to kind of maybe not put a lot of energy into how an actual media ingest happened in a particular man application or Pam or whatever phrase you want to use where you know, and I admit this wholly, you know sometimes we just assumed that a particular system would have a straightforward and highly efficient ingest workflow or multiple possibilities for a very streamlined ingest workflow.
Speaker 0 23:53 And again, the clients would just sort of figure out what works best for them. And one of the things I know I've learned being involved in this stuff for a while now is your ingest workflows are frankly, they can be some of the most complex, they can often be some of the ones that you need to actually define the processes of, you know, more than almost some of the other areas of how people use these tools. And so, you know, you take a tool like cat DV, well how do I get my media in there? How do I get my media? And you could have how do we do the catalogs? You know, you could have a worker node automation that is automating how files on a file system get brought into this database and which subset of the collection, you know, which catalog and Kathy V parlance they're, they're connected with.
Speaker 0 24:40 Um, but then again, you might have some users who literally just drag and drop from finder windows Explorer right into the cat DV window. You might have other users who use the ingest button. All of those are technically different workflows to largely accomplish the same thing. And you can't just say, Oh you know, you can do it this way, this way, this way, have fun. You really need to evaluate the dynamics of that environment. And what are those users doing moment to moment, day to day and we have to help define for them, well you'll probably be best off using this way of ingesting files because of X, Y and Z. This is most compatible with all of your other activities.
Speaker 1 25:22 That's right. So I think what we often find when designing these workflows is that there's a key question that is often missed out because um, you know, early on you were talking about in the workflow, okay we've got this pile of technology, we've got some Adobe staffs and Telestream staffs and cat DV staffs and cameras. Actually the question that we asked right back up from is why are you doing this? What is the problem that you're trying to solve? And then that gives you some basis then to decide what is the best work do we want in?
Speaker 0 25:52 Take that all the way back to like, cause I know that we try to do this more and more now when we come in. It's not, Oh you need some storage. How fast does it need to be big? Does it need to be our first questions when we get, you know, immersed in a new environment. Even very early on in a conversation we say, what do you do around here? Yeah, what do you do? What kind of content are you making? What's your job? You know, there's camera lenses on one side and there's people watching it on their screen on the other and there's a whole lot of stuff that happens in between. Yeah. Where are you and what are your overall, you know, end points and outpoints in that larger pipeline, you could be producing 32nd spots. You could be producing three minute long industrials, you could be producing hour long conference. You could be working on a two hour
Speaker 2 26:44 Documentary with hundreds of hours of raw material over the course of two years cause it's your life's work or whatever. Right. And like again, how you would approach just the basic ingesting assets so they can get into the database so you can start tagging them. Yeah, that question might be answered very differently in those different types of circumstances. Right. And the skill of the workflow designer is being able to flit between the business questions. So what's going to be better, faster or cheaper or less stressy. Um, after you put an asset management system in, right then down to the, to the detail of how an ingest workflow is going to work and how many parallels and different ingest workflows you might want to have. Going back to that ingest question, and I keep saying to my guys, the devil is in the detail simply doing one picture and labeling a box ingest.
Speaker 2 27:31 That's another one I'm stealing. Dave, I hope you're okay with this. This is all good. None of these copyright and the devil absolutely is in the details. So which, so we'd like to kind of follow through the life of a file. So you know, let's imagine I'm a file, I'm going to be created in some FX package or some ensemble camera. What's going to happen to me, you know, I'm going to be injected onto some storage somewhere. I'm going to be secured somewhere onto some tape or some other kind of backup device plowed or whatever. I'm going to be used doing some editorial and content creation process. Uh, I might want to be able to then be reused after my kind of initial, um, after my initial use. And just what is that? What is the life of a file look like? And that really helps to kind of focus on what this detailed workshop w workflows really need to look.
Speaker 2 28:20 So one of 'em actually one of our clients, um, he gave a great talk at, at this Henry Stewart New York event and you know, he talked about his role managing creative operations, creative ops at a major, you know, international broadcaster and you know, he uh, images, the promo department, they generate tons of promotional materials. Obviously the promos that you see on their TV channel, you know, it could even be printed materials, graphics, banner ads, everything that goes into promoting the brand and their, their content. And he talked about a process that he developed that I thought was fantastic when he talked about this a couple of weeks ago. He literally, and you know again it comes back to like how do you relate these concepts to creatives? Right? And he's a highly creative guy is funny, you know, humorous works for a very humor oriented a broadcaster folks might be familiar with. And um, they actually drew out car like cartoony storyboards that illustrated how do they ingest materials today? And it was literally, you know, little FireWire drive comes in from the field and did it and there was literally a storyboard that went along and it really follows this theme of the life of a file that
Speaker 0 29:41 It's perfect. Because the third thing I was going to say I guess about workflow design in addition to kind of set the objectives and the devil being in the detail is draw pictures and write it down and stick it on the wall because you are implementing a change program. And kind of going back to the kind of big company consulting things, change can be a bit hard business process management. And we don't have to do all of that kind of bad approach, right? So draw the pictures so everybody has the same vocabulary. Have the objective so you can explain why are we doing this because some folks are gonna have a much easier job and some folks are going to do have to do a little bit more work. Um, but in order to make systems stick, understand why you're doing it and then be very clear about what it is you actually doing and you know what and and, and the point I want to make, and again, it came back to this very humanizing way of storyboarding.
Speaker 0 30:34 What actually goes on when the hard drive comes in? What a lot of the time, again, even in our own thinking, I think we start mapping out a workflow. We try to, again, even just phase one, understand what they're doing today. If you can't wrap your head around what is being today to deliver the material or whatever. Now granted, if someone is setting up a whole new company, a whole new department, you, you get that quote unquote green field opportunity where you can kind of define it from scratch. So it's a slightly different scenario. But the reality is the vast majority of people we work with are already doing the work that they need to do. They just need to augment it somehow. And so, you know, my inclination would be, well you drop a bunch of boxes on a sheet of paper, you start drawing lines between them, you create a flow chart essentially.
Speaker 0 31:21 But the thing that I think even I used to do, I probably still do, and I'm having to wean myself out of this thinking, is you might make the boxes, various pieces of technology or systems that things are flowing between and the lines to connect to the boxes are the stuff that the humans may be do to push things between these systems. And I think what's really important for people to do is don't give the human parts of your workflow any less attention than the underlying technological aspects of that workflow. You know, if Jane needs to manually copy a file between the sand and some other file server in order to get it out to the thing where delivery takes place from that part of Jane doing the copy is as important. In fact, maybe even more important aspect of the workflow to be analyzed and scrutinized.
Speaker 0 32:19 Then the fact that it's a Sam connected to a NAS, complete a copy command. It's like, well, you have to, how much time is Jim spending manually having to copy these things? You know, if there was a way to automate that. So you know, this is what I, I think is a key point. And again, something it sounds like you've been learning over the last four years, and I know we continually do, it's, you have to design workflows and workflows are not just things that technology is touching and involving. It's the humans who are also plugged into that workflow and really understanding what they are. A lot. It's so it's the life of a file, but then the life of the human who's manipulating that file and really making sure you see it from both perspectives. Right? You need to kind of meet in the middle. And that's where we're usually able to do the exciting stuff with technology.
Speaker 1 33:10 Yeah. And just to kind of to, um, to kind of recap and to relate back to that very first question, which was how things have changed, right? So I think, you know, the first part of this discussion has been all about, we've all got a lot better and understand a lot more about workflow design. Um, but then another thing, and this is, this is pretty relevant to, is this doesn't stop. So we've introduced recently into our support process, which is, you know, people have had cat DV for a few years as long as they're on our maintenance program, which gives them tech support and upgrades. Then if folks have had category for a few years and they're looking for some guidance on how to optimize their use of cat DVD, or maybe there's been some personnel changes and nothing was written down when the first implementation was done, we never run into or been involved with that before.
Speaker 1 34:01 Well, I'm sure that's because you're an extremely good partner and integrator. And, um, so we do this thing called the workflow health check and uh, it's not overly complicated, but it basically go through the same stuff it goes through. Why did you originally put an asset management tool in place? What did you hope it would when you, in terms of, you know, being better, faster, cheaper, what is the workflow? Can anyone actually describe it these days? Documented? Is it documented? What cameras are you working with? What other systems you're working with, what's integrated, what's manual, what are people doing this process? And just taking that step back really helps people to, um, to, to just really get a handle on, on their system at an ongoing improve. And so in terms of themes, then we've introduced that into our support process as part of the whole growing up thing.
Speaker 1 34:50 And I think so I think if the kind of pithy answer to your original question, which is what's happened in the last couple of years, well, the industry has grown up a lot and I think cat DV has grown up even more so support since the beginning of this year. Uh, we've been running us support hours out of our UK team so that we can provide a shorter time to fix if there are issues, um, that our customers are finding in the field. And that's going really, really well. When I look at all the kind of metrics and stats, I can see that much more what I'd expect to see and I kind of professional support organization. We've got these kinds of services like a health check, uh, to try and ensure that folks are really getting the best out of their cat DV investment and linking right back to the start of the process. We're better at doing the design the workflow and making sure
Speaker 0 35:38 That people get the right set up on day one. There's a term that I, I understand is often used in software development, which I haven't had a ton of experience in firsthand. You probably could inform me more. Um, and I know some of the developers we work with use this term and they use it not only developing their software but to evaluate the needs that the software needs to accommodate and what they call them, our user stories. What are the user stories that this software is having to accommodate? And it does put the user of the system kind of injected directly in front of the conversation, right? Because there's a special vocabulary
Speaker 1 36:18 User story. So as an editor I want to get a job done by doing some stuff. Uh, it just, it absolutely goes back to your point. I think about, uh, the, the storyboard, the cartoon storyboard. It's absolutely what are folks doing in order to get stuff done and its user story stories. A brilliant being able to take people away from bits and bulbs and you know, I, you know, I often get emails through that say, Oh yeah, we want cat DV to be able to move this file from this file system. So the file system and the transcode this format, this, this format and yeah, can we just do that? It's like, why, why,
Speaker 0 36:54 What's it like to step back and let's step back and say what is, what is the point? Yeah. What are you trying to accomplish? Exactly. Yeah. So we do that a lot. Um, I think going back to development, I mean other things,
Speaker 1 37:04 Again, trying to kind of think and relate to your question about what's changed. I think I've been encouraging the team to do a lot more listening, I think over the last three or four years. And, um, in fact it was beautiful. This year's NAB. I heard people come and tell me things that I'd said. I was like, brilliant. You know, so, so this listening thing, so, uh, I, I listened to folks, I tell folk, staff and then I hear it repeated back. I mean, there must be a good loop.
Speaker 0 37:30 Can you help me with these listening skills? No. In all seriousness, you know, again, you know, people know I like to talk. I really hate it. I never noticed, kills me. Um, you know, I enjoy, I listen, I enjoy dialogue. But one of the things you really do have to learn, especially, you know, I'm in a presales role, I'm usually kind of before we're implementing a project, so I'm largely interfacing with people when it's still all is in the realm of imagination and ideas coming together. You know, you have to ask a lot of questions, but you have to be willing to really not only listen to but comprehend the answer. Right? And it cooks stuff out of people. And you know, one of the things, again, I think it's changing a little bit, you know, we're an interesting case, right? We used to call ourselves a VAR, a value added reseller, and then we realized like, you know, online catalogers called themselves FARs and that's clearly not what we are.
Speaker 0 38:28 So that's maybe not the best fit. Maybe it actually in some ways does describe what we do, but it's been co-opted, right? And then, you know, we, we, we look at this, this term of systems integrator or reseller or whatever it is. And you know, the reality is we're a consulting company that happens to also sell some of the products whose technologies we consult around, right? But I consider myself a consultant. I consider most of our staff members, pure consultants, and we like to think we make the right decisions and then can actually lead to a good implementation as well, which not a lot of consulting firms are willing to kind of put on the line and say, not only can we give you the great ideas, but we're actually going to help you implement.
Speaker 1 39:08 Absolutely. And you know, we, we've, we've grown our team quite considerably in the last couple of years. And the last hire that we, uh, that we made into the team was a consultant. You know, we want some folks that can help us to build a product out, but more importantly, we want folks that can listen to the customers and can understand what they're saying and then turn that into great software. And what I think has happened
Speaker 0 39:28 Amongst the clients that we either already work with or, or are getting to know. You know, it's interesting the folks that have worked with us for years and years, especially the folks who have worked with us in kind of the deepest capacity where we've really kind of almost been invited into the organization and I can tell you they, they tell me very regularly, they say, guys know, we see you as peers, your colleagues, you're not a vendor. You're not selling us stuff. We want to see you be successful. We want to be successful with you. We want you to make us more successful. We're all in the shoulder to shoulder is how someone very kindly put it recently. And one of the things I've seen is I think when some clients begin an engagement with you and they say, Oh, you're just a product vendor, or to us it might be, well, you're a reseller.
Speaker 0 40:18 It may be okay, you can install it, but you know, that's basically all we can get out of these resellers. They can be a little guarded with really opening up about these workflow considerations because right. It's the Holy of Holies. It's the most intimate information about the goings on of their organization. You know, it's where they have to actually tell you about the things that maybe aren't so perfect in their world. And maybe that's because they invested in a platform, as you said earlier, isn't necessarily realizing the promises that were kind of behind it or what the goals for it where it hasn't demonstrated those wins. You know, very quickly. Again, when you incorporate the human side of the workflow conversation, you're going to learn about who on the team just doesn't like doing some things even if maybe that sort of is part of their job. Right. See, this is why I love cats, cat
Speaker 1 41:10 DV as a channel product. Um, we in the state do no work directly in the UK. We do actually, we do some work direct, but that's mainly to just educate ourselves about the business and the market and get closer to customers. Um, but we love the fact that we sell through the channel exclusively here in the States because it does allow those folks that really understand workflow and really understand their customers' intimately
Speaker 0 41:34 To have those kinds of conversations. You know, I think it actually promotes far better business relationships. If you can have those open discussions about, well we need to save this much time and money and there were these difficult people and we need to make this business change. Well if you can have that conversation openly with your suppliers, you're much more likely to get a good outcome than simply shifting some units and boxes to get some new funky kit. And isn't it a good way for someone to evaluate potential suppliers as well? I mean, think about it. If you're really looking to change up the way things happen in your organization, either at a, again, a departmental level, an enterprise level, somewhere in between, you know, the, the reality is you ought to be working with someone who's not only asking these questions of you, but who I like to think, you know, it's one of the reasons we do this show.
Speaker 0 42:27 I like to think we're teaching our clients and potential clients about what are the right questions for them to be asking. Not only of us, but internally. We want them to be better capable of understanding and framing out how even their current workflows work. And I'll say this, you know, if you're with a customer and you know, you are talking to vendors about really almost any type of solution, you know, the reality is if they're not having a workflow conversation with you, they are probably just a reseller. If they're not showing an anxiousness to get to know this side of your organization and frankly get to know it intimately. Listen, we say to everyone, you know, put us on an NDA because we're happy to sign it. We keep these things very confidential obviously, but you know, we want you to feel comfortable opening up to us about these cause we will make better recommendations for you, not just about which tools might be useful to you, but you know, again, each tool gives you 40 million different options for workflow.
Speaker 0 43:35 Yeah. If you open up to us and you trust us and we build that type of a relationship, then we will be most equipped to give you the best advice from the perspective that we have. Which again, at Chesapeake, we like to keep a multifaceted perspective when it comes to everything we deal with and you know, we can help you better and we'll do, we'll be a better partner for you, but you have to be comfortable opening up. And if it's, you know, I'll tell you when we come into an environment and they're very closed about that stuff and you can tell that things aren't probably working great. I mean, maybe they're even being very open about things that aren't working well, but then you just don't get that warm fuzzy and they don't, again, let us in, you know, the other, the other side of that is, um, I went, I went to, uh, to talk to someone once who, who started the conversation with, well, we really don't have a workflow and, and, and I said, kind of means you just have a different one at any given moment, you know, how do you, how do you get any work done?
Speaker 0 44:35 Like what, you know, explain, you know, you shoot footage, you, you, you end up with videos. Like, you know, and he said, well you know, like the, the footage comes in on this camera format and blah blah blah blah and we put it on a storage and this person gets it and they do some editing and, and the motion graphics and dah, dah, dah, dah. And then um, you know, and I said, well you just told me what your workflow is like I, there's probably some things in there that could be more efficiently done or handled, but you do have a workflow, you know, and, and it's funny cause again, I always get the sense that out of all, not only industries but especially the media centric industries, video is sort of last to the show when it comes to many things because you go into the world of publishing, you know, even digital publishing, the folks who do, you know, used to be quirk express users and now they're in design.
Speaker 0 45:23 They talk about workflow all the time. It's totally baked into the way that they do things. Cause again, my theory is because these digital technologies have been immersed in their industries for longer because their data storage requirements and their bandwidth requirements were so much less for so many years. You know, they were able to cost effectively start to incorporate some of these technologies earlier than folks dealing with maybe hundreds of terabytes of content. We're able to, so they, they've formulated many more of these delivery workflows, work in progress or whip workflows, which is one that is some of the most complex stuff. It's again, how do you actually have individuals and their creative tools working together to create an actual finished piece of content. The publishing folks, they kind of dealt with a lot of this stuff a decade before the video folks started getting into it. So you know, we're having to get them to really understand, no, you are part of a workflow today and let's figure out what it is and then we can figure out how we can improve it. Figure out how to, how to integrate something like, like a a media asset management platform.
Speaker 1 46:31 Yeah. And to take your to that whole point, including the consulting point, even a stage further I think and the way the industry is moving is that customers do demand consultants that can engage with them on equal terms about how they get work done. Um, but then that forces our consultants to become experts in particular verticals. I think that's something that we're doing much more of in cat DV now. So whether it be sports education, uh, corporate video, there are some quite distinct different usages of cat DV that folks have, whether it's different metadata, schemers different ways of being able to harvest content, share content. And I think that consultants and us as a manufacturer, um, can add more of and over the, over the coming years, I'm sure we shell, uh, about particular vertical specialties and um, you'll be seeing a lot more of that from cat DV in the coming months.
Speaker 0 47:25 So I want to make sure we have some time, um, over the next little bit before we go our separate ways here until the next time we're back with us. Hopefully not two, three years out, but you know, sooner, although we get to luckily see you a few times a year, which is always a blast. I love it. Um, you know, it's been an interesting four years media, video industry, broadcast, internet, OTT, video wise. You've just spoke to how this environment is changing quite a bit these days. So let's keep in the subject of things that you're noticing have changed. You know, there is a lot of movement going on in the industry, the monetization models with more and more people consuming content online. There are different models for monetizing that. You know, ad insertion rates don't carry the same premium, at least today, quite yet that they do for broadcast television.
Speaker 0 48:21 And yet you either are a set of eyeballs watching something on the internet or on TV. But wait, it's not even that simple because many people are computing and watching TV at the same time. So what is the worth of an ad impression when you're surfing your laptop? While there's also something up on the TV? The industry is coming to terms with a lot of changes, not only in content consumption on the side of viewers and distribution models via over the top internet distribution, but you know, uh, you know, just the type of content is changing. I mean, heck, we're now starting to actually see a lot of three 60 degree video getting generated. So, you know, between the business models being completely upended and with a lot of the big broadcasters knowing like, this is fight for your life kind of time, right? If you're, if you're heavily invested in the old way of broadcasting linearly on, uh, you know, over the air, through a cable network, that's all changing.
Speaker 0 49:19 And then the backend technologies are changing, right? Like there's this cloud talk cloud, cloud, cloud. It comes up every day, you know, so maybe we can start from, uh, a content consumption and viewership side of things. I'm curious, given that this four year stint, you're, you're now well into it, Cathy V largely coincided with the rise of internet video broadcasting, for lack of a better term. I'm curious how you see that trend starting to affect the conversations that are surrounding Kathy V? We've been very aware of this trend for awhile and we definitely see it informing what some of people's goals for these man projects are. How can you help us deliver yeah. To an ever greater and varied number of these distribution outlets. So, and let me answer that as well by uh, by talking through some of the massive change. We've had an app product line in these last two, three years as well. Um, because I think that is fairly significant. I am hugely proud of what the team has been able to achieve. I think probably for the first couple of years I was always banging the drum faster, faster, faster. Um, and actually they have really wisdom to
Speaker 1 50:28 The challenge. So I mean, just to kind of step through some of the things that we're doing in our platform in order to make it able to survive and thrive no matter which way the industry goes. Because I think it's, you know, I'm not particularly a gambling man. I'm not, I don't really know how things are going to go, but what I do know is that cat DV can be the most well-connected asset management tool in the business. It can be the most flexible tool in the business to fit with any workflow, whether that's a business workflow, whether it's an on premise workflow, a cloud workflow or a hybrid workflow. Um, and that we can be a partner through our best. Um, our, our best integrators, our best consultants, uh, that will listen to our customers and get them the best deployment. So I think, you know, we're trying not to make too many bets, but there are certainly things we're doing in the product line to leave as well positioned to be successful no matter where things goes. So just to kind of step through, cause I, I am so proud of how far the guys are going.
Speaker 0 51:24 I will say as a third party, Dave isn't full of crap. People like, since you've definitely seen, you know, everything he's talking about, David said he learned to listen. Well, I have to say again, my, my flapping mouth has been one of the things he's had to contend with for the last four years. And he does it. He's really listened. And so we're just as thrilled in hearing about these things as the listeners maybe.
Speaker 1 51:45 Absolutely. Well and so it, you know, this is, this is, this is reciprocal, right? So absolutely. You know, we have had a lot of, um, uh, help and guidance around our web product <inaudible> product, uh, our worker product from the folks here particularly, uh, that have helped us to make a better set of a better set of tools. So let me just kind of step through. So, so in the last couple of years we've brought out cat DV 11, and that had a major, we work with the player engine that gave us legs for new play, new formats, new camera formats, and keep our edge of being able to play native content better than anybody else.
Speaker 0 52:19 I mean, again, that's something that puts cat DV in literally. I mean, almost a totally unique category as far as these platforms go. Yeah. Because of its capability of native file format playback and talk about the change, right? I feel like these camera manufacturers, pardon me, I think they have just rooms of people sitting around figuring out how can we come out with a slight variant of our codec that requires everyone to redo their decoding. Everybody a little bit more irritable and so you know, you talk about kind of, you know, if there's a trend I'm willing to bet on Dave, it's heterogeneousness right? As a theme it's there's only going to be more formats, more things to contend with, more variables, more distribution mediums, things aren't going back to VHS beta SP is the format that everyone uses. Composite video is the base band version that everyone uses to pipe between different machines.
Speaker 0 53:24 You know, things aren't going back to everyone is using self-contained QuickTime mov files for everything. You know, just diversity. It's always going to be something new. It's going to throw a new set of variables at you. You're going to have to adapt your workflows and your processes because you know these camera people and a lot of other aspects of the industry. I feel like they practically come up with these changes. For fun. Yeah. And you guys being able to just stay on top of the formats. That's one of the biggest challenges we have with really any vendor of any type of software we're dealing with.
Speaker 1 53:56 And we have some folks that are dedicated to doing that day in, day out and uh, and they're doing a whole pile of that, um, as we speak. So and so. And then our, our ability to handle California's natively is closely allied with our ability to take a copy of a cat DV catalog and just take it off site and do something with it. So you can be on a boat in the middle of the ocean with no internet. You can be working on a cat DV on a plane or whatever, working on a cat DV catalog and come back to the office. We've got some cool new stuff coming in the next couple of months that will allow you to take a server base catalog, take it on your boat, do your edits, um, update your cat DV metadata and plug in and do an update. And so, you know, you can imagine some really distributed workflows. We're, we're quite big and documentary making. So a lot of the David Attenborough content, uh, the hunt I think is the most recent. They use cat DV extensively, uh, in their productions. And it's just stuff that will really help those workflows to get a lot better.
Speaker 0 54:51 And again, something that has really been quite singular to you guys is this ability to start completely remotely with your content and then at a time that is convenient back on my internet, back in the real world, back in your office kind of merge all of the, the law, the logging info, the metadata, all of your tags back into the database and your content as well. And cat DV has always given us ways of doing this that have been much more flexible than the other platforms. And the inverse is true as well. Starting in the office, starting in the connected world, a dis attaching temporarily media and the catalogs themselves, tag log, tweak metadata, come back to the real world sinking that
Speaker 1 55:36 <inaudible> 11 Mertens and that's just one of the, one of the things. So category 12 which we announced at NAB, I've been using it ever since and I hate going back to the cat DV 11 now. We've put a fantastic new user interface. We've had a lot of graphic design help. Um, and one of the things that we've really focused on, and in fact you've helped us with Chesapeake, is how do we, how do we provide this huge power and sophistication in the cat DV product, but make it really accessible. It is trivially simple to make a simple product simple. It is really easy to make a complicated product. Complicated. And I, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking competitor names as I'm, as I'm saying this stuff. Exactly, exactly. I'm trying to, I'm trying to be well behaved. I think the thing that cat DV does really well and
Speaker 2 56:24 Category 12 we'll do even better is just put the tools in front of folks that they really need for the job that they're doing. So being able to provide the sophistication and power while at the same time, not overwhelming folks. Well, you know, let's speak about that because in the few years you've been there, not only have you given us these more simplified role based interface modalities to the main cat application, so you can strip away some of the extraneous visual baggage for users who are in their user role playing their part of their user story. They just don't need it on the screen. Right. And you guys have brought out the more simplified views that you keep enhancing by essentially simplifying yes, but still allowing all the power of the person who's in that role with that view needs. Yeah. And going back to the kind of listening thing, I was in Canada last week and we had some fantastic conversations about our web client, a web client.
Speaker 2 57:16 Um, web two was designed to unlock the potential of cat DV, uh, to use it outside of the production team. So kind of a YouTube interface, uh, you can turn everything off so that it really is trivially simple. You can skin it really easily, and there's a great new scanning tool coming anytime soon. Fantastic. Um, so what I love about what you guys have done with the web client is that it really does speak to some of these shifts of who needs access to this content and what they're doing with it. Right back again. So, you know, one of the things when you joined square box, the web of view of cat DV was very basic front end. So, so yeah, forgive me, I'll blame the jet lag. Um, so, so look, so we have our great new cat DV web thing. We met some folks last week.
Speaker 2 58:03 They said, well, you know, that web client, that's all the way. Well, but we're production team and it's not working for us. You know, one of the things we'd really like to do is to have a more production focused web client. It's like, well, okay, we didn't make it for that. We made it to be able to share stuff with people in the PR department, social media department guy I need to publish out. I might need to kick some published Twitter workflows or whatever. And so it just underlines that different people have different requirements from this metadata. One size does not fit all. And so we, we are committed to having a variety of interfaces that really help folks just to do the job they're meant to do. So we have cat DV desktop application for power users. We have web to, for those folks that want to share stuff within their organization or outside.
Speaker 2 58:47 We have our partner application a as a distribution asset management tool. We have API is coming out of our ears these days. We've been adding more and more over time XML command line and more recently rest. Um, and I can imagine following some of the conversations last week that we'll have a yet another flavor of web, um, app, a web application that is designed more for production users but using the web. Well, again, think about what the remote editor needs out of a web user interface to aid in their circumstance. Work in progress oriented asset management
Speaker 0 59:22 System. Yeah. If that's your use case and you know what they need out of a web view, it's going to be totally different than that social media team user and the PR team or the marketing group who I just need to surf the web videos, see what's been cleared for me. Occasionally go through the archives and do a little mini edit of something and just push it out myself or just find a self contained piece that I want to put on Instagram.
Speaker 1 59:46 It's actually a bit so you know, I'll make flippant about these API APIs, but we have got API is coming out of areas and it is deliberate. In the last two or three years we've added uh, API APIs to being able to view change, manipulate metadata. Uh, this year we introduced an administration API that allows you to set up and configure cat DV, uh, in forthcoming versions of cat DV. In fact, have already seen an early version. We'll have server health, health status in there. The estuary and special logic plugins have got QS and queue management in there, um, as API APIs. And, and one of the other big changes we put into cat DV is in service seven is whole lot of stuff kind of behind the scenes. A lot of refactoring work that enables us to use cat DV as a platform. So cat DV can be extended. So okay, we've got metadata on assets. Well with CA with work with service seven, we can have metadata is custom metadata on markers or on users or actually you can set up
Speaker 0 00:46 Analog catalog to logs or set up your own. That's a gasp. No, we, we, we, we learned this at NAB, but as folks who have been, uh, on the cat DV bandwagon for a few years, catalog based metadata is something we're really excited about.
Speaker 1 01:03 Right? And, and, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. When, when, when I look at the things that we've done in service seven to enable cat DV to be the platform for other things to be built. So that's just an allowing us to add metadata to existing things in cat DV. So users, catalogs and markers or custom metadata to those. But you can set up your own entities, you can set up your own. Let's imagine you want to have some payments or some
Speaker 0 01:31 Other sorts of customer records or some DRM records. So if they like simple object models, flexible object model. So particularly
Speaker 1 01:38 Open to developers. But it enables captivate to be the platform,
Speaker 0 01:42 A whole pile of other stuff. So let's, I'm gonna rewind. I don't want to assume cause you know what they say about assuming makes an ass out of you and me. It's a podcast so we can say those words. Cheesy. I'm a very cheesy person. You've known me for a while now you're just picking up on this. It's like my middle name Nick cheesy gold. It's like, so you know that sounds like a Mac and cheese commercial. Yeah, exactly right. It's like so, so, but I want to explain this to our listeners who three minutes ago phased out, cause we started getting a little geeky here. But this is a very interesting thing. And I think it ties into how, as we were talking about earlier, the customers, the clientele are starting to be more flexible in their understanding of what these platforms are able to do for them.
Speaker 0 02:31 And so when we talk about the object model of a ma'am, a Pam, a dam, any kind of database platform, the objects are literally the entities that have their own unique identity within the system. So assets are clipped. So again, exactly an asset is maybe directly reflects an individual file, a clip or sub clip is just a purely metadata reference to a stretch of time code. You have a collection of assets which acts like a virtual, you know, folder for these things. But really just at the database level, not on your underlying file system. Um, other asset types in cat, DV, other object types. You can have sequences, users, groups, all of these things. And what's very interesting about what you're saying to us, Dave, is that one of the things I think that again, as we've got deeper into that consulting role and we realize a little bit of that business process and management perspective, when figuring out how these technologies map into a customer environment.
Speaker 0 03:35 You know one thing we know is every customer environment truly is a unique special snowflake that's not like any other snowflake. And what that means is sometimes we need the embodiment of some kind of entity that is representative of a important organizational unit within the larger organization or workflow that we need to somehow embody in the database that we can link other things through. We can say, well, this represents a project project is now a new object or a new entity that we are capturing as an embodiment that links to things has its own metadata, has processes that may be automated, but around this conception of how things fit together. And so this idea that we can now get a bit more under the hood with cat DV and create objects or entities within the database that might only have important serve value to a particular organization.
Speaker 0 04:35 They say, well this represents a job list. We have a thing around here called a job list and it's all the little clips that I don't know a colorist might have to do color correction on. And we just give them lists of these things. What we can maybe create a type of entity that we could put individual assets into and attach metadata to and attach metadata that's specific to the entity type of a job list that a colorist needs. And it all ends up between having the API APIs and all of this. All of this new object stuff has come is controlled via rest API APIs. Um, all these API enable cat TV to be used as a platform, as a toolkit so that we all are partners, consultants, integrators can use it to build all sorts of cool new stuff. So one of the other things, and it's on this theme, I think there is a point, I'm trying to bring this around to, you've also added the ability, it's coming down the pike I think very shortly where worker nodes, which traditionally had to run on Mac or windows, you were releasing a Linux version of the worker node and the worker node is a very important thing to us cat DV integrators because it represents the automation system or at least a good facet of the automation system of cat DV.
Speaker 0 05:50 It's how we in some circumstances interface cat DV with other systems make certain things like ingest a set of automated processes versus purely manual. And so you know we've talked about API APIs, right? And we've talked about the importance of having a platform that through API APIs can talk to other software platforms cause that's what APIs do. API APIs, application programming interfaces are the hooks that various types of software systems have to talk to other software systems. And so between a Linux-based worker node, API APIs coming out of the wazoo. Right. You know but but the importance that that entails when you understand the theme I'm seeing here and tell me if this is reflected in kind of what your clients are coming to you for. Cause I will say they certainly are for us it is this view that ma'am Pam, whatever you want to say that this thing that cat DV falls into is damn whatever terminology.
Speaker 0 06:53 People are starting to shift from seeing it as a work group level technology to an enterprise technology which means we need API APIs because enterprise software platforms have to talk to other enterprise software platforms. It might be your tape archive software, it might be Amazon S three and the API is it gives you to deliver content to their cloud based storage system. Could be an accounting system or a corporate dam. It could be your customer relations management software. As you said, accounting, billing. All of these processes want to maybe start to get integrated together. No one piece of software technology is going to do all of this stuff in every organization, but the way it can be useful on that enterprise level is that it can plug into these other systems, start trading assets, trading metadata, have actions that are kicked by something that's happening external to the platform, but it can kind of say go and an invoice that hits the billing system that says this person paid for this piece of content could trigger a workflow that encodes it into a format that's specific to them. Maybe they're a content licensee and they've gone in and maybe you've created a content licensing portal that maybe they're coming into cat TV, web client 2.0 they licensed some content. You've given a view into
Speaker 2 08:16 A few things. They kick off a workflow. I would like to license this content. Well, we might have to kick an external message to your billing system. The it's API APIs and we talk to those through the cat DV API APIs that says invoice this customer, they've entered into a licensing agreement for X, Y, Z piece of content that they found through their web portal. So we have to talk to that other billing system to get it to kickoff it's invoices and that also then maybe maybe you have a set of rules that says, well they have to pay for it in order, but for them to get access to the unwatermarked version. Well maybe that's a check someone makes in that invoicing system or an automated process that says this is now paid for. That could automate the delivery of the file back in Kathy V and again the billing system that's embodying those parts of the process and the media processing system, which is obviously cat DV.
Speaker 2 09:09 They're doing this nicely orchestrated dance behind the scenes that you know, we've crafted through code and by writing to these API APIs to create a cohesive set of business processes. Right. But I mean, are you finding that the cat DV client a lot of the many way or are starting to see the tools as something that's broader as an enterprise technology than maybe they initially conceived? So, um, so Cathy's made its name in the small to mid sized systems market. Um, and we have, we have about 1200 enterprise customers at the moment. And I think that's a ton that it's tough. So, and it was a four letter word I was going to put right before, ton there. But again, I try to let alone a shedload it's a shit load. People that's, that was shit shit. Oh, that's what I said. That's what I said.
Speaker 2 09:59 Yeah. So just like you're thinking it's a muck term. So it's a metric Mactan I think so. Um, you know, my, my yard is into play and I think last time I checked they're up about 1800, 2000. So enterprise customers probably about 20,000 installs. It's a big deal because you know, avid has essentially a, you know, an embedded market of people to pitch their solution to. And there's a lot of avid editors out there and if they're up in that territory and you're in that territory, I mean there's a lot of ma'am, quote unquote vendors we deal with that might have like 20 installs or installs. And so we've been really good in the small to mid sized systems. Um, we've introduced a line of product where I've got a client and now a server. We happen to happen to label them the Pegasus line, which, which uh, better able to handle larger deployments.
Speaker 2 10:53 So we've got small, medium and large work group, enterprise and Pegasus in our parlance. Um, and then by having these API APIs and this custom object model, then we have a fourth layer that we're really unlocking, which is custom, bespoke, whatever you want to call it, which is, it's very much consulting led. It's very much using cat DV as a kit of part. Um, and really it's for those very large scale deployments. We've always been able to handle large numbers of assets, you know, 5 million upwards and lots of users can currently, but what the, the latest changes to our server. And there's been a huge amount of work, uh, to service seven to get this going. And what the latest changes does is unlock the ability to extend cat DV, whether it's us doing it, our partners doing it, our customers doing it. Um, because we do see that there's so much more potential.
Speaker 2 11:42 Khatib has made its name in the small to medium size market, um, with a few very large customers, um, smattered around. And so we have some of the major broadcasters, some of the major sporting organizations, then a big system, uh, back in, uh, back in Europe with a company called Dawna that handled a lot of, uh, MotoGP, uh, content, massive cat DV system, two big servers. I think we have 40 workers controlling the hell out of the advantages and the throwing things around with clean feeds and dirty feet. Sure. Yeah. There's, I think there's six. There's four cameras per bike and 12 bikes per lace of motor motor racing is, is one of the most footage generating things that people do on the planet these days. 20,000 dark hives need to happen. Um, every week before the, uh, the kit gets packed 20,000, essentially archived jobs before the kids that need to be before the kid moves on to the next venue or the next venue.
Speaker 2 12:42 And that is a distributed workflow. That's, that's the crate that goes around the world. We also have a great backup base where we, uh, where we have to share all this metadata and orchestrate content. So they take their cat DV server essentially on the road and it become one of their academies, one of their connectivity servers. And again, because it's so easy to exchange catalogs and associated assets and metadata between systems, very easy to feed what they've been working on in the field into the enterprise system. And that again, going, I mean, we're running a little bit, but they make extensive use of our premiere panel. And so, uh, we love working with the folks at Adobe, which is very, very well designed by the way. Well, thank you. Thank you. And again, I hate to just keep just blowing smiles and sunshine and rainbows your way, Dave, because I'm really just a nasty human being when people get to know me.
Speaker 2 13:32 But, uh, no, what you said about listening and what our earlier conversation about looking at things from the creative user's perspective. Yeah. We sat down at CCW probably four years ago, three, four years ago, and I was like, listen, we really want to do more with you. We've done more with you in the past, but you've gotta look at things from the perspective of these folks and streamline it as much as possible. I mean, you really do it. You really think about what it's like to be a person in that role. And you know, not every man vendor out there I think is as willing to be as Impathics in the way that you look at things. So that's
Speaker 0 14:12 Great. Thank you. It's, it's a very genuine vibe that we get from you guys and always have and it's, it's been fantastic under your watch I should say. Cool. Cool. Well, and it's fun making this stuff too. And you know, a lot of it is built on these just strong technical underpinnings. The reason we're able to go so fast is because a lot of the work we did in those kind of first two years when I was in the firm, um, really gave us the platform then to, to move. So the premiere panel is actually a big pile of um, big part of API calls to our rest API. Um, you know, we're talking about making a production version of our web client, you know, it's a tiny amount of engineering. Um, so we'll probably do that. So, um, yeah, it's really, it's a Testament to the great design that the likes of often John, our CTO and our chief architect have put into the product.
Speaker 0 15:00 So, you know, we, we've talked about a few things that have changed in the last several years that you've been involved in all of this fun stuff. We talked about a very workflow centric approach to even evaluating the types of needs that these technologies may account for. We talked about how cat DV is really becoming more of an enterprise platform than just a pure work group level work in progress, pure production asset management tool, and it's expanding through enterprise, you know, backend technologies, API APIs. It's ability to talk, it's ability to scale much more broadly throughout the enterprise and how that is really a very useful thing to have in this ever changing world of media consumption and distribution because you need to be able to turn on a new workflow to go to a new device, a new platform, a new website, you know, at the drop of a hat.
Speaker 0 15:56 Before we wrap up today, I want to talk about something else. Again, we've, we've talked about it a little bit today, but it's one of those changing pictures that I have a feeling that if we were to do this talk again in another two to three years, well this would feed another hour and a half of conversation alone and what we'll have seen as a change between now and then cloud. Yeah. It's almost difficult for us to talk to anyone these days without it coming up. Whether that's a small scale user, an individual person who is wondering does the cloud somehow give me sets of tools, whether it's for collaboration, data, storage data or content distribution, you know, cloud is coming into carving archiving. Exactly. I mean back up, you know, you name it. Cloud is sort of starting to present options for all of these things. And I imagine when you first came on board four years ago, you probably weren't getting too many requests to integrate with Amazon S three and now the latest version of cat DV has a direct Amazon S three cloud storage integration. That's right. Let's take a few minutes. Tell me what you're hearing. Tell me how you're adapting to it and tell me kind of you think it's going
Speaker 2 17:10 And how you guys are trying to stay relevant as that whole technology tide apps washes in. So, so cloud is part of the increasing complexity that is storage today. So I guess maybe kind of being a bit slow, but you know, I'm just kind of thinking about the sizes of content that professional broadcasters are going to be taking. Um, and chatting some folks in the last few weeks, then clearly 4k everyone's always talking about 4k and that's fine. But then start thinking about, well 4k plus high dynamic range might make things twice as big, 360 degree video, 300 CTD victory, which might make things 10 or 15 times as much space. Oh it's amazing to experience though. I may have to assess, you'll put an iPhone into a Google cardboard, then you download the New York times, you know, and why VR app, NYT VR app and you're somewhat compellingly free diving with sperm whales, you know, a hundred feet below the surface of the water.
Speaker 2 18:15 And like you're like I just put my fricking iPhone into a piece of cardboard. Yeah. Like where is this all going to be three or five years from now? It's something that I think a lot of people are getting excited about. Yeah. Yeah. One of our partners showed us one of our camera manufacturer partners, so there's an Oculus rift and uh, and they had um, I think one of the classic clips server Paul McCartney concert. And I found myself feeling embarrassed cause I was standing there on the front of the stage and you're like, so the crowd was looking at him in front of all these people. It was cool. Um, but I'm going to get back to my, uh, my thread now. Things are taking up more and more space. So that's hard. Dynamic range, high frame rate, three 60 degrees. So for K and we hear people talking about AK now it's like, Oh, we're going to blow through 4k and the camera manufacturers are going to force eight K on us in the next three years. Well, so let's imagine that, you know, high flame, like 125 frames per second and HDR and that's going to make things eight times bigger than 4k. So I think there's a theme that folks are kind of a bit scared about what, what is happening with, with storage as a whole. Um, and then you add, let's give the dog a second to scratch here. Sorry folks. That's actually me.
Speaker 2 19:34 Itchy carry on. Okay. Um, yeah, so, so I think folks are beginning to get quite concerned about, about where is this storage explosion really going. Um, and I think that leaves cat DV uniquely placed because there's lots of folks out there that have their little viewers for their own particular flavor of storage. But actually what it means, at least for the, for the next few years for the foreseeable future, is that folks will be working with a hybrid of a variety of storage technologies that they need to manage. And there might be some tape
Speaker 0 20:08 LCFS optical, Amazon kind of object storage stuff. And that might be object storage through the cloud providers. It might be object storage through some of the on premise solutions. You know, with things like quantum lattice, it's got an SD API, we're doing some certification with some Cleversafe staff and another vendor. So, you know, I think that the storage market is just going to be increasingly complex over the next few years. And I'm not a gambling man, but what I want to do is enable cat DV to be able to thrive and manage all of that. So you know what I love about you're not being a gambling man, Dave. It just means you have to essentially accommodate as best you can all eventualities play nice with everyone. And, and if, if there's a theme of technology, especially as it relates to the media industry, it's, we don't know where it's going.
Speaker 0 20:58 The only thing we know is it's changing. The change does not seem to be slowing down. And you make a very interesting point that I, you know, what light bulb moment right now for me, which I appreciate very much because this is a very interesting way to think about it. You're dealing with maybe still HD, I say maybe still HD cause like this 4k thing has hit so hard so fast that even our customers who aren't even thinking about distributing 4k, they're still shooting it because it's what their camera does. And it's just so tempting to put that setting into 4k mode to be quote unquote future-proofed, you know, storage requirements be damned. Right. And you know, people are gonna say the same thing once there's the HDR setting and now it takes up eight times as much as 4k but you know at 120 frames and yet they still want it cause maybe it'll be useful to them and you know the camera guys, they can't help themselves to flick that switch if they think it's going to mean the footage looks better and frankly they don't often care much about how that's going to affect postproduction and post post might not be informing any of those decisions that production is making about those formats, the bit rates, what they have to accommodate the workflows.
Speaker 0 22:10 Can we deal with that new camera format that this new camera generates? But I haven't thought about this in terms of the cloud because the people who say I want to use the cloud, I want to use the cloud and we explain to day when you account for both the cost of cloud storage itself. If you're using a cloud service provider at a tier of service like Amazon's glacier, which is very cheap to put stuff in into store, but they really deliver the moment you need to get it back out. They hit you with potentially much larger fees than you're used to seeing when you're just having them hold onto it. You might come up with a model that works for utilizing cloud storage for HD and I feel like a lot of our clients when they figure out, Oh, I can just do it this way.
Speaker 0 23:00 Now they are drawn to the idea that now that they've kind of it, they don't have to think about it again and what we try to stress, and I think what you've made a fantastic point of is, is you have to maintain flexibility. If you think today in may of 2016 that just because you may be found a way for the cloud and especially the storage side of cloud to maybe work even as your archive for HD content in this format, if a year from now or two years from now you're shooting in some other format that's eight or 16 times as much space and bandwidth required, that's going to have such a major effect on your bandwidth requirements to get to that footage. How much you're paying a month to your ISP. Cause now you don't just need a hundred megabit or even gigabit, maybe now you need a 10 gigabit connection to push things back and forth cause the bit rate is 10 times as much as HD, you know, whatever it might be.
Speaker 0 24:06 You have to maintain total flexibility. So for the folks who have maybe found a workable workflow that utilizes cloud storage for what they're doing today, they shouldn't assume that three years from now that workflow is going to meet an analogous set of needs when some new format is out there that hit much faster than people were thinking. It would. That's now out there. It's in demand. The camera guys are producing it in the field. They're there, they're all gung ho to always be throwing the eight K HDR, 120 frames a second button and you know the moment they hit that setting in production, you're going to have to do something with them. They're not always going to, they're not always going to consult with the production it team to make sure that you have the battery handle, that it's very much about the, Oh Hey we just shot this stuff, this the AK stuff with deal with camera that you've never heard of before.
Speaker 0 24:58 You can work with that. Right, and so you know it's beautiful though, but this idea that cat DV, whether you're maybe have found a workflow that uses cloud storage today in a way that's effective to achieve that workflow, don't assume that workflow will justice trivially map to the world you'll be inhabiting two or three years from now. You may have found a way to make cloud work in that workflow for you today, but on prem may just as much combat. When I say on prem of course, sorry. I mean we try to keep this as jargon free as possible. LTO based tape archive in the building on-prem, it's on premise, it's hard drive based, LTO based object storage based, but it's something on your premises that you manage. It's hardware, software that you maintain. You have to admin, you're responsible for that. Not we help you maintain. Well, we'd like to think we do. And yet, you know, I see people who are like, Oh, we think that in three years we'll be all in the cloud for our archive. Well, they're making those assumptions. Absolutely. Based on what they see in front of them today.
Speaker 2 26:04 Yeah. But if all of their production people are shooting one 20 frames a second eight K HDR footage, three years from now, they might have to reinvestigate everything from scratch again. And an organization that's like, Oh, we think we're gonna get rid of on-premise storage or archive in the next year or two. It's like, well, think ahead to what a world of even two or three years from now entails in the world of media technology. And if you're keeping track of some of what's coming around the corner, high dynamic range for K eight K high frame rate, what have you, stereoscopic, you name it, you know, you might have to deal with a totally different scenario that completely invalidates everything. You put so much energy into two years to develop that only really held up for HD. Right? Yeah. And I think the other point as well, and I hear a lot of people talking about cloud, um, but it is all in the restore.
Speaker 2 27:01 So the, the cost of a store at the moment is high. But I think as well, um, I think it would, it would, it would suit people to lead in detail. The service level agreement you get from the cloud provider, which is essentially we'd take responsibility for it. Nothing, nothing, no liability. We don't even guarantee to keep your data. So, Oh, and some of the fun ones, and again, this wouldn't typically be for the more commercially minded cloud services, but folks might be surprised, you might be giving some rights to your content to the cloud service provider. Think about that. You may be saying in the there software service level agreement, I allow you to use some of the footage of stuff that I am storing in your cloud service for your own marketing materials. Now it's more of the consumer oriented cloud providers that are inserting those types of terms, but again it's throw your legal guys on that because you know again, when you take responsibility yourself versus farming it out well there's a lot of baggage that comes along with that that you need to investigate thoroughly and so and so.
Speaker 2 28:09 I'm going, going back to the story of our S3 plugin. It's built by ourselves from the ground up with a grand new Q that's exposed on the web, on the Academy website or the Academy server website and can be managed from there. The reason we did that was because clearly there's a move to the cloud and so step one, be able to archive to the cloud is an obvious thing to do. Be able to use an Amazon S three API is an obvious thing to do. We have meetings at about four or five vendors that wanted to certify against our SAP API so that we could work with their particular flavor because a lot of other people are using the SRE API commands as at least the framework for what the API is into their own platforms are, even if it has nothing to do with Amazon.
Speaker 2 28:49 So, so we, we implemented S three for that reason. By the way, we also implemented a spectral logic black Pearl integration. It's the very first application to get certification officially from spectral logic had been good. It's been in their labs in testing. We put a lot more error checking in on their advice to handle particular things that might go long with a black Pearl and LaPorte, that bag. And we did that to learn much more about the, the world of tape and how to handle tape through APIs. And it's not the same of handling, um, uh, spinning storage or normalize three storage. So we've learned a whole pile through that. Going back to the listening thing, um, absolutely. And I will say that as a spectrum partner, uh, you know, we support any technology that has a piratey sound to it like black Pearl. I know it's great, isn't it?
Speaker 2 29:34 But you know, it's interesting cause you know, the guys at spectra said, you know, there's all of these very heavy archive platforms. If we were to distill interface to a tape library into the most basic elements that would need to have and you know, take away the complexity of those platforms and say that complexity is going to be baked into workflow automation, that's going to be part of your, ma'am, we don't need to generate little viewing proxies and store metadata for your assets because frankly that's kind of what your mom is for. And we don't need to replicate that functionality. Let's just give people API APIs to deposit in and get back out of our library. And those guys have been a real pleasure to deal with. So we've, we've got that. Um, but I was just going to say that, um, one of the things we were talking about liability, we were talking about how secure things really when they're stored on a kind of a public cloud, uh, rather than a kind of more professional kind of on premise solution like a black Pearl, um, is that guarantee that stuff's going to be stored there safely.
Speaker 2 30:38 And we've got V one of our three plugin out there at the moment that uses it. Uh, Amazon's best practice for putting stuff up there. And so we're confident that it's good, but I'm still a little paranoid myself about working with this valuable content. And so we're going to be implementing a paranoid mode, which does a full copy two S three and then a fall the store and then a check to be absolutely certain that what we've written, uh, to the P to the cloud is exactly what stored. And I think there's a lot of hype around the cloud and a lot of folks I think kind of leave reality by the front door. Uh, and when they're coming in and you can't, you have to just keep the common sense with an archive. It's usually quite safe, quite sensible to write to places that might be to LTO, one of which is off site. If you're going to the cloud, maybe it's two different cloud providers or as we, I mean listen, we like to tell people if you want to take a preservationist approach to archiving your media, multiple geography, geographic locations, multiple data storage mediums maybe or maybe an on premise LTO and, and a cloud. Yeah. And, and again, it's, it's do you zip it, do you target, do you wrap it in some other rapper and then put it in? Cause you know, you have to look at how easy is it to get your actual content back
Speaker 0 32:00 Out of these things. And sometimes that might assume, well, 20 years from now, what's going to be easier to get out? Uh, you know, MXF op, you know, <inaudible> with this codec in it that, you know, Sony invented
Speaker 2 32:13 For this week and this week only we right back round to workflow design and the devil being in the detail. Isn't that neat?
Speaker 0 32:19 It really is true. And again, you know, cloud especially, I mean listen, all you gotta do is read the cover of any magazine that's trying to go after CEOs and like it's all cloud, this cloud that, you know, accelerate your career by introducing cloud technologies into your organization. You know, I mean to be blunt, and I don't think it's totally, you know, a crazy idea, but I think you have a lot of CEOs and very it centric people who really, they see the cloud as an easy out right now. It's less stuff that I have to take responsibility for. And we see that a lot actually. And the irony, I mean, while there can be some truths to that, in some environments the devil is in the details. If you've just taken 300 terabytes of your most prized content, shipped it out to Amazon and you haven't done the type of data check some that you're referring to to make sure that the stuff that ended up in their cloud based storage, because people take this for granted, files get corrupted all the time. They get corrupted when they're just sitting on your hard drive because literally some stray neutrino from the sun hit your hard drive in some weird way that flipped a bit. This happens one bit. Flipping in your file can destroy it. It's flip all the time. It's flipping into transmission bits, flip while they're at rest. You know
Speaker 2 33:47 You have to do these file checks and they have to have a lot more when you're moving them over. Public internet connection to a cloud storage solution. Right. Is it safe to say that our files exist as probabilities? I think so bad and you really want to try to get the probability of it existing at point B and point a as enmesh as possible. We need to actualize your files into existence and I are really trying to bring a metaphysical perspective into these conversations. It's probably shredding as cat kind of thing about does my content really exist? It's on the cloud until I pull it back and try, well, considering this doesn't, Dave doesn't considering like those guys would say this cup doesn't exist because I'm not looking at it right now. It's not real. I think the same could certainly be said for strings of ones and zeros in some amorphous state online. Right. Bringing the double slit experiment to, exactly. We're going to get around to that. People were trying to introduce a very physics oriented approach here to the workflow show. Yeah. I take file duality kind of thing, but you're here, but you're making some great
Speaker 0 34:48 Points, you know, just because something is the new shiny, even if it has these all, all of these associations as being the way enterprise is going, the devil is in the details. You need to work with vendors who are accommodating the shifting tides, but they're not just following it because it's the industry buzzword of the day, right? It's all about we have to understand where these things fit. If some guy says, Oh yeah, I just want to have a push button way of archiving hundreds and hundreds of terabytes to the cloud and I don't care to make a check sum as consultants, we have to say you're crazy. Yeah. Like we don't want to implement this for you because it's going to bite you in the butt. We'd be happy to implement a version of it that also thinks through some of these other eventuality.
Speaker 0 35:38 So this approach that you've brought to the table of awareness of what's going around in terms of the roles that people are expecting your technology to be able to fit into. I need to be able to talk to true public cloud storage. I need to be able to talk to on prem systems that speak in the language of API APIs or even specifically <inaudible> or S3 derived API APIs. So if I, you know, want to transmit files and metadata between systems using that way and not just copying things between two drive icons you have mounted on your desktop, you can accommodate this. You're staying present with what people need of the technology, but you're not going all in. You're not sitting here and saying, Oh yeah, if you want your entire infrastructure to be on the cloud, cat DV does it. We are support the new S3 API.
Speaker 0 36:30 And this is why we love working with partners like you guys because you're willing to step back and kind of put on your thinking cap and tell people sometimes in that consultative role why they might be wise to consider several things. Even though they're saying, I just want all of my content in the cloud. Right. And I love it. Flexibility, but not just jumping on bandwagons and uh, and accommodating the trends of where things are going, but not being fully incumbent to them and saying, well, you know, this cloud thing might work good for your DV 25 archives. You know, you're, you're, you're, you're 25 megabits per second stuff because it's cost of going up there being stored and even what you expect to retrieve out of it is negligible. But yeah, that other 13 formats that you deal with is it, does it also make sense at the end of this conversation I had a few years ago with Brian Summa about, uh, whether a Dromo is a suitable, uh, you know, full of storage for your, you know, video production organization.
Speaker 0 37:34 And he said, well, you know, it's okay for my mom or my grandma, you know, and, and I was like, w what do you mean? And he goes, well, you know, like for iTunes, you know, and I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah. So I, I use that a lot. Like, it's okay for my mom, you know, maybe not for your fortune hundred company, you know, maybe not for your, you know, $10 million a year, you know, video production, business acquire. Yeah, no, but that's a great point. And again, openness, but I think a skepticism and taking the lessons that we've learned and that you've been learning over these four years with square box and just, it's, it's always this reiteration, right? It's always this, you know, the eddies of our conversations on a day by day basis and those whirling currents, they feed back into the stream that we're all following here, which is this, I don't know, digital Nirvana that we're all trying to get to I guess at least as far as your average content creator and distributor is concerned.
Speaker 0 38:33 But we take all of this feedback and all of these real world experiences and we're open to these outside perspectives. We have to accommodate them. We have to stay on our toes. This is the tech industry and the media end of the tech industry and be informed by what people are asking of us, but at the same time be willing to then feed that back into additional questions. Cause I've found, you know, you ask the right questions, you can often get people to come to the correct conclusion really of their own volition. Right? It's kind of taking this a while to get all, you know, putting my first year philosophy classes to work in a hermaneutic approach to circling in through dialogue and the kind of Socratic dialogue of getting people to the conclusion without even having to give them the answer. Let them come to the answer themselves.
Speaker 0 39:20 Maybe I've got a more homespun version, which is kind of two heads are better than one. Three are better than two and if you can get four people just working on a nice simple workflow design that you'd draw up on the wall and does get to the detail, you can get some great results and that, that kind of consulting, pragmatic consulting to solve real problems, I think is what cat DV is about and I think is what chatter does really well too. Well, I would disagree with you on any of that. What do you disagree, Jason? I'm not at all. Ben, you think? I think that holds true. No, we like to make things exceedingly. No, but sometimes you know when you let that complexity in there, then things start to get a little complex. There's a point that if it's three people plus Nick, you know, you might be better off if Nick leaves the room for a little while, might get more done.
Speaker 0 40:02 Well I think that's a fantastic point for us to wrap on. Dave. We've been going for quite a while here. You know, for our colleagues in the asset management or workflow automation industries or just creative space who love this stuff. I'm sure they've been following along here. Everyone else we've, we lost about an hour ago, but this has just been great. We'd love your perspective. We love your insights. We love the fact, you know, when we do this show and we have very bright, bright people on like yourself, you know, we have these light bulb moments where we get to see things from a new perspective and maybe get some good catch choice phrases that we can, uh, you know, we can reuse these things, incorporate into our own dialogue because we're all just trying to get to better understanding what the people that we work with and make sure we're all on the same page.
Speaker 0 40:45 And you guys have been a tremendous part of that for us as well over all of these years. It's great to have you in tandem as a partner. You know, we actually just closed probably our largest or at least most sophisticated cat DV deal for sure just last week. So we continue to charge ahead with you guys. We're very open to all of the different possibilities. We didn't even have much of a chance to get into things like your partnership with a comi and the folks at North shore automation who are augmenting the cat TV platform even above and beyond for additional workflows and use cases and user stories. So there's just so much territory that you guys have delved into and so much growth and it's just such a pleasure to get to work with folks like you. Well and it's, and it's reciprocal.
Speaker 0 41:25 So we enjoy, we enjoy working with you guys and we certainly enjoying doing events like this. Thank you so much for coming on today, Dave, and thank you so much for any listener who's still with us at this point. If you're obviously having graduations, I know we have to come up with some key word. How about Greek yogurt? If you email Nick gold or
[email protected] with the phrase Greek yogurt in the subject line. I don't know. We'll dig up some piece of Chesapeake swag at the office and sent it to you. The supply of Greek yogurt. Exactly sponsored by, no, no, no, no. We don't have a lot around the office. Maybe we'll send you some just just kidding. Yeah, my business card now, but thank you so much for listening and we are in a much more regular production cycle of the workflow show. Now we're going to be continuing to get fantastic guests like Dave Clark here on and we look forward to getting additional feedback from our listeners and if you ever have any suggestions, questions, complaints, comments, jokes, what have you, feel free to send them our way. I'm just simply
[email protected] and you can fire directly to me and thanks again and until next time, and I appreciate Dave being here and also our producer Ben Kilburg, also Chesapeake solutions architect as well as Jason Whetstone, our workflow engineer. Xtrordinair thank you guys. Thank you everyone. See you folks.
