The platform era: How an Asian OTT player built ‘everything’ on the cloud

We live in a digital world where anything can be built, deployed, and run on the cloud, instantly. The pandemic has made us all realize the importance of this capability and underscored the importance of building infrastructure to support it.

Think of all of the largest players in the world. They’re all ‘owners’ of digital infrastructure today – and whether or not that is for public consumption, it definitely supports their business, staff, and customers via seamless applications and experiences on the cloud. Ultimately, this phase of technology we’re living today is about building platforms, delivering applications, services, solutions via intelligent and dynamic multiclouds.

From an insider’s perspective, the largest ‘digital-native’ leaders are preparing for the platform era as every business is looking to live and work on cloud-based platforms. Compelled by this growing demand for (cloud) infrastructure, leaders around the world have set out to build the infrastructure to support this revolution.

Truth be told, although they have a sense of the potential of the digital economy that will result from these new-age platforms they support, they can’t help but be amazed at the scale of what they can do and achieve once they begin to work on it. That’s the story of one of our clients in Asia who have an OTT business – and leveraged the infrastructure they built for their OTT business to support other digital players in the market looking to move to the cloud.

The client’s objective was to deliver OTT services seamlessly, but its investments allowed the company to cement its position as a leading service provider to customers looking to move to the cloud in the region. Now, from an industry perspective, both of those are radically different from each other – and there lies the beauty of technology. It blends the lines between industries, provided leaders are willing to stretch their imagination.

Our client’s decision to partner with us for this mammoth project was partially based in the fact that we have a certain degree of depth in our portfolio of solutions that caters to their need, but what won them over was our experience in this space and our ability to support any and every partner they would decide to bring in to architect their infrastructure and develop their ecosystem.

Visualizing the new world of OTT

OTT has been around for nearly a decade now. Initially, the biggest challenge for players in this space was centered around developing their own platform. Today, as demand surges and use cases increase – providing a good experience to the end user is all that matters. Developing that experience means finding ways to make the platform more seamless, to deliver content seamlessly even when the customer faces bandwidth issues, and ensuring the platform’s application interface supports any device and network the customer may use.

Encapsulating everything is security, of course. This is why every OTT player needs to deploy a layer of protection that extends to its users and protects its intellectual property, without disrupting the experience.

When building its infrastructure, our client chose top of the line hardware from Cisco, leveraged some of our systems and solutions, and brought in a mix of their own proprietary technology – to mold themselves into a force to reckon with in the digital era.

Once everything was set up and in place, what the client’s engineers really liked was the fact that working with us allowed them to gain visibility and observability into their infrastructure and put them in a position to start automating several everyday tasks which really gave them the edge in not just the OTT business but also as a cloud provider to businesses looking to thrive in cloud-based platforms.

Expanding horizons as a cloud player

The cloud is an exciting technology, but the reality is that it can be a tad complicated to control once it has been deployed. This not only directly impacts costs but also ties up developers to constantly audit, fix, and re-iterate instead of focusing on optimizing and scaling.

Deploying it for their OTT business allowed the client to understand what a business with a heavy need, dependence, and reliance on cloud technology would struggle with on their journey. Once those were fixed, the learning was captured and documented to ensure customers who worked with them to deploy their own cloud-based solution would find answers more easily and quickly. It’s what makes them a great partner in the cloud space today – and we’re proud to have enabled them.

In the coming months, as applications, solutions, and platforms on their network grow, they’ll realize that the single-pane-of-glass view that they gained into the infrastructure they built with Cisco is what will help them keep their OTT business in shape and ensure that their cloud customers choose to keep growing and scaling with them.

What our client already enjoys is the automation capabilities we’ve provided them with. Automation today isn’t just a buzzword, it’s what we need if we want to deliver best-in-class services in any space and industry; automation is a first step to intelligence in many ways. The automation that our client has invested in will allow them to keep pace with the market, irrespective of which new player makes a move to entice their customers.

If platforms are the future and everything is built on the cloud, it’s hard to ignore the fact that optimizing cloud infrastructure is what matters most today. For any business seeking to invest for long term, visibility, observability, and intelligent automation are the levers they need to focus on.