In our March webinar, Peter Watling, Senior Sales Director at Perifery, was joined by Dan Deadman, Technical Director at ccktech, to showcase the companies’ collaborative approach to delivering cutting-edge storage and workflow solutions to the Media & Entertainment industry.
The webinar kicked off with introductions from Pete and Dan, highlighting their roles within Perifery and ccktech respectively. Pete explained that through a series of acquisitions, Perifery had been formed as the media division of parent company, DataCore. Discussing ccktech, Dan elaborated on the company’s 31-year history, which traces back to their origins as a VHS tape manufacturer. Today, however, ccktech are a storage-focused reseller that pride themselves on their high level of service.
A Shared Ethos
The conversation moved on to the topic of the partnership, which began about 6 years ago with ccktech and Object Matrix (which was acquired by DataCore in 2023). Dan had approached the company – where he met Pete - on behalf of a customer who wanted a future-proof storage platform. Dan explained that it was the stability and simplicity of the Object Matrix technology, as well as the additional toolset and aftersales support, that were driving factors for making the connection. With a previous history of working with media asset management (MAM) technology, Dan was particularly interested in the metadata capabilities that Object Matrix provided. He said, “the ability to add all that metadata at point of ingest was very powerful. So that was something again, that was quite key to those early decisions.”
Both companies share a common ethos of prioritizing customer satisfaction and problem-solving, which laid the foundation for their successful collaboration. Dan said, “we pride ourselves on going the extra mile, and, I know from having some difficult phone conversations with yourself over the years, you guys always go the extra mile as well. And I think that's why the relationship works.”
Transition to the Cloud and Managed Services
Highlighting the beginning of their partnership, Pete explained that the two companies had initially worked together on-prem, deploying systems in facility. However, when discussing customer pain points in April 2020, the conversation turned towards the transition to cloud services, driven by the need for flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Object Matrix (now Perifery) went on to enhance their cloud offering, giving customers remote, yet secure, access to their content from any location.
Pete emphasized that it was both Perifery and ccktech’s media industry focus that ultimately drove the success of the cloud storage platform, “the combined package of Perifery and ccktech, being focused purely on the media world, is we understand the challenges and we understand the pain points.”
Highlighting ccktech's move to offering managed services, Dan shared that it had come about from a customer wanting to have a secondary copy of their content. Sharing his reasoning for working with Perifery’s solutions for their manged services and disaster recovery, Dan said, “it was a no brainer to partner with yourself and the rest of the team because we knew that you'd understand what we were trying to achieve in helping us deploy that and getting up and running.”
Future Trends and Innovations
Pete highlighted the upcoming AI-driven innovations to Perifery’s media management tools, including auto-ingest, automated metadata extraction, transcribing services, and facial recognition. Dan added that these enhancements are what customers are asking for and will be a real value-add for ccktech customers.
The webinar concluded by inviting the audience to visit both Perifery and ccktech at upcoming events, NAB Las Vegas in April and the Media Production and Technology Show (MPTS) in May.
