CA Impacts Ways Businesses Interact With Customers

CA, cloud-computing powerhouse Salesforce is impacting the ways in which enterprise businesses interact with customers, partners and employees.
Its popular CRM and sales applications have attracted clients like Facebook, Wells Fargo, Virgin America, Activision, GE and more – providing the company with a wealth of success stories to share.
To communicate these narratives, the company leans on an internal creative team known as Storyforce. Led by Director, Senior Producer Clayton Talmon, Storyforce develops 30 pieces of video content per month on average, which are created in part by leveraging a Facilis TerraBlock shared storage system to securely store and manage assets.
With help from Distributor Cutting Edge, Storyforce introduced a 72-TB Facilis TerraBlock 24D into its workflow last year to assist with the production, curation and secure storage of customer video stories, presentation content and training materials for new hires. TerraBlock has since become an integral cog in the team's operations. A vast digital warehouse for assets, the system currently holds 500 client case studies and training materials created by Storyforce.
"New content is flowing in and out of our facility all the time, especially as we expand our library, so we're handling more and more content. The more we pour into TerraBlock, the more we get out of it; every month it grows in value," Talmon said. "It allows us to easily pass projects between different groups while quickly loading and exporting files. Some of this material is highly classified, so having the ability to implement a closed system and manage permissions has been critical."
Storyforce's TerraBlock 24D is connected via a 16Gb Fibre Chanel switch to eight Apple® Mac Pro® workstations with 1TB SSDs that run Adobe® Creative Cloud™, Black Magic DaVinci Resolve 10 and CAT DV for content management. Each suite is also equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards and LTO-5 backup capabilities. When projects demand real-time editorial, Storyforce also makes use of a robust filming studio on site, which is equipped with BlackMagic cameras that run directly into the TerraBlock server and into an edit bay.
"With Fibre Channel also going directly into our filming studio, we can start cutting while we're shooting if need be. Our workflow speed is ridiculously fast," noted Talmon.
In a production environment where several technical variables contribute to the success of a project, Talmon has also found the reliability of TerraBlock a huge advantage. "The beauty of TerraBlock is that it does what it needs to do quickly and reliably. It's fast as hell and rock solid – brilliant," he shared. "I don't need to know what secret sauce Facilis is doing to perform its storage voodoo; I just need to know I can depend on it to work. The fact that TerraBlock is bullet proof and solid 100% of the time eliminates over a thousand potential problems in the digital pipeline chain, which is great when there are so many other parts of the human workflow where things can go wrong."
(CD/JP)