The AWS Summit was held in Bangalore on July 5, 2013. It was a part of the road show by Amazon that included Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. He was holding sessions with key customers across APAC, listening to and addressing key workflows on Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure service, AWS.

Amazon invited Ittiam to be part of the on-stage panel for the Bangalore summit presided over by Dr. Vogels as part of his keynote. It was just the right forum for Ittiam Chairman and CEO, Srini Rajam, to publicly talk about the Ittiam’s Media Cloud foray – for the first time.

Amazon AWS Summit was a resounding success. With registrations long sold out, I could see the Amazon local and global sales and solutions team jazzed about the tremendous reception the summit received. Starting all the way from registration, to the solutions booths, extending to the large keynote hall, the crowds were buzzing. I was impressed not only by the scale of the conference but also by the diverse vertical markets being served by Indian companies building products on AWS Cloud Infrastructure.

Ittiam was one of the five companies featured in the Customer Panel anchored by the Dr. Vogels. He asked about the journey of Ittiam, a well-recognized embedded systems company, to the platform of Cloud and AWS. In response, Srini touched upon the strategic thought process behind and the opportunity for media technology companies to reach global markets and customers riding on the “universal platform” offered by the Cloud. Srini also shared the news that Ittiam’s maiden launch in Cloud would be an Online Media Transcoding Service scheduled for later this year. It is targeted to help Enterprises and Prosumers manage the video content on the cloud, transcode and stream to virtually any device with any resolution over any bandwidth. Dr. Vogels also referred an audience question on Cloud transformation, to Srini, asking him to elaborate using his own background from embedded systems at TI to Cloud workflows at Ittiam. Srini referred to the people, process and product know-how all playing an important role in this transformation for organizations looking to move to the Cloud.

In response to yet another audience question, Dr. Vogels also asked about the key challenges of making this transition. The one that sticks to mind from Srini’s response is the emphasis on building the team with right skill mix. Media on the cloud demands the intersection of people with deep video technology and cloud engineering expertise. It is really a relatively rare and exclusive talent mix. Ittiam was uniquely positioned to ride the transformation because of the deep-rooted media expertise and systems knowledge built over the last decade. Dr. Vogels was kind enough to then let the audience know that anyone with a passion for that unique combination should get in touch with Ittiam and Srini! Other challenges mentioned were in ensuring QoS that is high and at the same time uniform across the world with predictability and availability. Being veterans of the embedded market, an experience that transcends devices gets to be taken for granted, but making that happen in a Cloud workflow across geographies and regions would take some doing! Ittiam’s approach to meeting those challenges in partnership with AWS was highlighted in the discussion.

On the side-lines of the conference, many friends from the industry complimented Ittiam for extending its media expertise to the Cloud. Some were expecting and others seemed surprised. Either way Ittiam is now there for sure.