The Art Of Integration

At this year's NAB, SGL highlighted its close relationship with key partners throughout the show with daily demos on its booth.

This included presentations by Arvato, North Shore Automation, Empress EMAM, Glookast, VSN, Marquis, EVS and Grass Valley.

SGL's solutions developed in collaboration with partners enable the company to develop unique features for the benefit of clients, such as the highly effective partial file restore powered by Glookast. Partial file restore is a unique feature of the Avid® Interplay® Web Services solution developed by SGL. SGL's support for Avid® Interplay® Web Services means that customers can use the archive capabilities that they currently require, but can employ Avid Interplay | Archive at any time in the future without the need to re-archive any content. The partial file restore feature enables operators to easily select and restore elements of a clip directly from the archive in high resolution. Prior to this, partial file restore functionality could only be achieved using the full Avid Interplay | Archive system.

As well as Glookast, SGL has long-standing partnerships with leading manufacturers including Grass Valley, a Belden Brand. SGL FlashNet is key to the effectiveness of the content archive solutions it provides for all Grass Valley users. Today, the product integration between the two companies extends not only to the K2 SAN and K2 Summit production and transmission servers but also to the GV STRATUS media workflow application framework and production suite. This provides transparent access to the archive directly from Grass Valley's toolset.

GV STRATUS delivers greater workflow efficiency by enabling users to work collaboratively and accomplish tasks in parallel. GV STRATUS users need never switch to SGL FlashNet to manage their archive, search, or restore processes; the backend archive appears as a seamless extension of all Grass Valley environments. Even checking the status of a current request, or archive job queue, is managed directly within GV STRATUS. The archive may comprise disk or tape storage, or a combination of these in an archive hierarchy, using rules-based SGL StorageManager to manage the data lifecycle within the archive based on size, type, content or age.

The seamless integration of the GV STRATUS production tools and SGL FlashNet archive management solutions offers a simplified toolset with easy-to-understand workflow rules. Configured into a collaborative production environment, the workflows provide media organisations with all the tools necessary to plan, create, publish and archive their production.

VSN also presented a full demonstration on SGL's NAB booth. The two companies provide a rich integration between VSNEXPLORER media management and SGL's FlashNet content management platforms. The VSNEXPLORER family consists of four modules: VSNEXPLORER PAM, which focuses on production and post production processes; VSNEXPLORER MAM, which includes all the necessary tools for complete media lifecycle management, such as advanced cataloguing; VSNEXPLORER BPM, which adds an orchestration layer for defining business process management workflows; and VSNEXPLORER BI, an advanced Business Intelligence layer. The integration provides media companies with a complete, seamless toolset to efficiently archive and restore content between the online storage used by VSN's MAM, PAM and BPM solutions and the archive storage systems managed by SGL FlashNet.

As well as highlighting partnerships with third-parties, SGL announced that it has been selected as an Avid® Alliance Partner. As a result, SGL is now a key technology partner further validating its technical expertise. Avid certification, which is only available to Avid Alliance Partners, is granted to third-parties that can prove a high technical standard and seamless integration within the Avid MediaCentral™ Platform. Avid and SGL have held a strong alliance for many years, and this latest announcement further highlights SGL's dedication to providing open system architecture that delivers a fully accessible, high-quality content storage management system.

SGL also launched FlashNet Infinity at NAB. Due to be incrementally rolled out over the next 12 months, FlashNet Infinity provides broadcasters and content owners with an elegant dashboard that further simplifies archive procedures. It delivers a sophisticated toolset for archive and restore functionality, system health, monitoring, analysis and more and is available as a free upgrade to all SGL FlashNet users covered by a current support contract.

SGL FlashNet is installed and is delivering efficient broadcast archives to leading European broadcasters including: RTVE, Galicia; RTVE (Tenerife); Video Mercury (Spain); Telson (Spain); BBC Wales (UK); CBS News (London); RTE (Ireland); ITV (London); RTL (Netherlands); Endemol (Netherlands); MTV3 (Finland); Sky Italia (Italy); Nova TV (Athens); and SVT (Sweden).

www.sglbroadcast.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online here.

(JP/MH)