Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Nuxeo CEO Eric Barroca (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What parts of your technology are particularly tuned to handle these large-scale digital assets?

Eric Barroca: The big difference is that we can handle hundreds of properties. We can handle them well at scale and have very efficient querying. That’s something that you can’t do in the market. It’s very hard to do this on other competitive platforms.

Sramana Mitra: Are most of your use cases in all industry sectors related to videos and large multimedia file streaming? Is it fair to say that your core differentiator across different industry sectors is streaming large files like movies and videos? Is that the recurring theme that comes up?

Eric Barroca: No, the common theme is the complexity of data we manage. We don’t even manage the site. The differentiator is being able to store and manage very complex objects that evolve. A loan application in the bank involves thousands of properties. A movie has hundreds of properties. We manage these complex data models that you can’t really do in any content management system.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on the movie data structure. What is so complex about the movie data structure? Can you illustrate and tell us what does the data structure need to store and process?

Eric Barroca: You need all the broadcasting informants like when you can broadcast and what time range. The complexity of when you can change things and when you can’t is a very complex structure. If you look at the broadcasting format, you have to consider which type of devices, what parameter you need for the transcoding engine to transcode the movie to the channel, and then you have the list of actors. If it’s just a file, you can’t use it because you don’t know when to stream it. You don’t know how to transcode it. We apply audit trail, workflow, and business rules.

Here is the thing. When you want to understand who can access and what is the next step in the process, it’s a lot of data. Those data before that, you may have in Word document. The issue with that is that you can’t exploit them from a systems perspective if you don’t have structured data. The big thing with data is how you link a human and a machine. That’s what we are focusing on.

Sramana Mitra: In a nutshell, your big core competency is in managing complex data structures around the metadata of the digital asset?

Eric Barroca: Exactly. This is what makes it an asset. The file of a game is pure informational asset, if you capture the data wrong, you can’t use it in your business.

Sramana Mitra: That’s right.

Eric Barroca: You buy a movie from somebody. What makes it an asset is the fact that you have the data around that lets you exploit it.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Nuxeo CEO Eric Barroca
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