Software As A Service

SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE IS LOOKING GOOD IN BROADCAST APPLICATIONS Jim Martinolich Chyron Corporation Melville, New York

INTRODUCTION The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) concept is spreading throughout the IT and professional services industry. But does it have a place in the hardwareintensive world of broadcast television production? This paper will describe how SaaS is being used to successfully create broadcast graphics at many facilities today and how it may herald the future of many broadcast applications. This paper will describe first hand the experiences of one station that has successfully adopted SaaS into their news production workflow. WHAT IS SAAS? Like in any industry these days, software plays a crucial role in broadcasting. In a traditional commercial software model, a customer purchases the software from a vendor, incurring a capital expense that they expect to amortize over a period of time, and install it on their own IT infrastructure. The customer is now responsible for maintaining the hardware, ensuring the security of the application and data, making and archiving backups, installing upgrades from the vendor as they become available. When problems arise, the customer needs to contact the vendor and try to debug the problem remotely or wait for service representative to visit. As the customer’s requirements grow, new hardware and/or software upgrades are required.

Before SaaS, all these issues were assumed to be the natural cost of ownership and a necessary trade off for the benefits provided by the software. Software as a Service (SaaS) refers to a revolutionary new business model where the software application is hosted by the vendor and provided as a service to the customer via the Internet. In most SaaS applications a web browser is used as a client so little or no setup or installation is required. SaaS applications are becoming more and more common in every industry and in consumer applications. The saas-showplace.com website, an industry guide, lists 950 vendors of SaaS applications in 25 industries and that list is growing. Industry polls show a high degree of satisfaction with SaaS products. Common examples of web provided services would be Internet search tools such as Google, social networking sites such as Facebook, or consumer media sites such as iTunes and YouTube. All of these would be impractical if not impossible to be provided as desktop applications. A better example of SaaS as the “disruptive technology” changing the way we do things, is Google Docs which offers itself as an alternative to traditional office suite applications at no cost. Google Docs offers less features than traditional office products, but offers benefits such as online access to your documents and easy workgroup collaboration.

Fig 1 – Traditional vs. SaaS Software

The most common example of a successful professional SaaS application is the SalesForce Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). SalesForce has won numerous awards and their user base has grown from 5,000 to 50,000 clients (including Chyron) since 2001 and is on an exponential growth path. First of all, Salesforce is a well designed application that provides real benefits to their customers. SaaS will not make a bad application better. But the SaaS model proved to be a compelling advantage for SalesForce in the CRM market, for many of the reasons I will now describe.

SaaS simplifies the vendor’s job by eliminating the need to distribute software and ensuring it is properly installed on the client’s hardware. Updates are installed immediately and there are never any “versioning” problems. Customer service costs are kept to a minimum because service calls are not needed. The vendor maintains physical control of the software at all times. The SaaS ‘community’ benefits from economies of scale and can afford to provide a much higher level of redundancy and security in their infrastructure than could the individual client at a given cost.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF SAAS? SaaS has many benefits for both the vendor and the client over traditional software models. SaaS saves the client money because rather than having a large upfront fee like traditional purchased software, SaaS is usually sold on a subscription model. You “pay as you go” with a monthly or yearly fee per seat or per service. That means better return on investment since the investment is small. SaaS applications are usually very scalable and you pay for services as you need them. It is easy to add or remove users as your needs change so you don’t need to pay up front for your eventual long term needs. The client also benefits from not needing to purchase and maintain the IT hardware to run the application. You do not need to tie up engineering and IT resources maintaining the software, backing up data, installing updates, or debugging problems when they arise. Your staff can focus on producing good content and not maintaining their software tools. SaaS saves you time, because in many cases a SaaS application can be up and running almost immediately. You just log on. You do not need to plan ahead to purchase and install hardware. You do not need to wait for the vendor to come on-site to commission the system. Software updates and bug resolutions can happen immediately and transparently, you don’t need to schedule times for the vendor to come and install updates. With SaaS, the vendor is providing more than just the software application and a hardware platform, they are providing a 24 by 7 service and are responsible for ensuring that it works smoothly. This eliminates finger pointing, misunderstanding and delays. The vendor is constantly on-site and monitoring usage for problems. They likely have numerous clients and are learning how to improve the product through a variety of user experiences.

In today’s mobile environment, there are collaboration benefits to a hosted SaaS application offering centralized data storage with ubiquitous web access. Before Chyron adopted the SalesForce CRM, each salesperson had their own contact database which they would occasionally update. They didn’t always have access to their own database when they were on the road. Customer Service and Sales had different contact info and there was little sharing of information between them. SalesForce unified all the contact and customer information into a single database that is remotely available to everyone, whether they are in their office, at home or on the road. It is instantly updated across the board. New contact information can be entered once and everyone has it. For instance, a record of a service issue is immediately available to the salesperson so that they can follow up. WHAT ARE THE CONCERNS ABOUT SAAS? Broadcasters are constantly adopting new technologies, and with every change the benefits have to be weighed against the risks. What are the risks associated with the SaaS solution? And, more importantly, how do they compare to the risks of hosting the application yourself? The most common concerns about SaaS solutions are availability and security. How do I know if the application will be available when I need it? Will it be more or less available than if I host it myself and at what cost? As was described in the previous section, it is usually the case that the SaaS vendor’s infrastructure can take advantage of economies of scale to build a more reliable and fault tolerant system then you could afford to have in-house. And if there are problems in the application, the vendor’s staff is available to diagnose and fix the problem immediately, in many cases even before you know you had a problem.

Many prospective SaaS users may think, “What if my Internet connection goes down?” While that is a valid point, modern IT practices provide extremely high levels of availability, redundancy and security. The Internet has become a “mission critical” component of almost every industry, and tremendous resources are committed to keeping it working smoothly. Large scale Internet outages are so rare that they are international news when they occur. Localized outages can be managed by your service provider. No doubt you have been using the Internet in production for many years and have a proven track record with your local provider. Backup plans can and should be in place. A downed Internet connection would affect much more than the one SaaS application. Especially in news production, the broadcaster is fully dependent on their Internet connection to get the information they need. How safe and secure is my data? Once again this is a valid concern, and a prospective SaaS customer should ask the right questions and ensure that the vendor provides the necessary levels of safety and security; data backup procedures, redundancy in hardware and power systems and geographic redundancy. Is the application scalable in case there is a sudden peak in usage? Will the data be available to me in a form that I can use outside of the hosted system? Compare all this to the level of safety and security you can provide if you bring the application in house. Managed and backed up data storage has a real cost, just ask your IT manager. The SaaS vendor has the advantage of economy of scale lowering the relative costs of this storage. The bottom line is that the SaaS vendor’s job to provide availability and security along with the application. THE SAAS INFRASTRUCTURE A SaaS application must be hosted on robust infrastructure in order to provide the necessary availability, security and speed. A Data Center is required that provides high availability of services; reliable redundant equipment, power, cooling, fire protection, physical security, managed storage and high Internet bandwidth. It also must provide around the clock maintenance and support staff in case of problems. Maintaining a private data center is not cost effective for the typical SaaS application, instead they are hosted on a shared data center called a “collocation center” (or ‘colo’). The colo is operated by a third party and provides the basic physical infrastructure including extremely high speed links into Internet

peering points to guarantee a high speed connections to anywhere on the Internet. The SaaS vendor leases space and bandwidth at the colo facility and is responsible for providing the necessary computer hardware. It can range from a single server to one or more 19” racks. A typical SaaS application requires at a minimum a web server and a database server. Since there should be no “single point of failure” both the web server and the database should have redundancy built in. A simple clustered server has an active online server and a hot backup. If the online server fails the cluster management application switches the application over to the hot backup. A SaaS application that wants to increase throughput will use a “load balancing” system to share the workload among multiple redundant online servers. Each web access is routed by the load balancer to the next available server. Load balancing requires some method of persisting a user’s session information from one request to the next. A SaaS vendor may also want to plan for geographic redundancy, a second hosting facility located far away from the first with a means to fail over or load balance between the two. That ensures availability of the application in case there is a catastrophic failure of the primary colo facility. Cloud computing refers to another new hosting technology that different than collocation centers. In cloud computing, IT resources, computing hardware and storage, are a commodity similar to gas or electricity provided by a service provider. Amazon started offering spare resources from their vast stockpile of computers and today their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) charges per hour for CPU resources and per gigabyte to move data in and out of the ‘cloud’. Google, Microsoft and less well known companies provide cloud computing resources. The pros and cons of cloud computing are similar to those of SaaS, but in cloud computing the IT resources themselves are the product not the application. And you can easily see that the availability of almost limitless cloud of on-demand computing resources provided by some of the biggest names in the industry will encourage the growth of SaaS applications of many kinds.

A BROADCAST SAAS APPLICATION Not too long ago, television production equipment was mostly custom ‘big iron’ hardware. When broadcast software applications running on PCs first appeared it was felt they were too slow and unreliable. But some of these applications had compelling benefits and managed to work their way in. Today if you walk through the equipment room it’s hard to find a piece of equipment that isn’t a PC. The transition to SaaS applications is the next inevitable step. AXIS is Chyron’s hosted online content creation system. It is an example of a broadcast solution that truly benefits from being a SaaS application. AXIS is web based tool for creating hardware independent images and animations for a variety of television, web and print applications. It requires no special hardware, technical setup or administration management. AXIS was designed for operational and technical simplicity and low operational cost. It was designed to be easy enough to be used by anyone, and yet still deliver compelling and relevant content. AXIS works using a variety of common news templates and tools to populate them. The producer logs in, selects a template and proceeds to assemble the desired graphic or animation. Weather graphics are automatically populated with online weather data. Quotes and charts are generated from real time market information. Street level maps are generated from web based mapping software. Full screens and OTSs are composited from a library of images using a unique and intuitive web interface. AXIS interfaces

to AP and Reuters’ image libraries and can store a station’s own images for easy reuse. And it is even possible to use AXIS’s Order Management System to order and track special graphics you may need from your own art department or artists elsewhere on the network. When the graphic assembly is complete, it is downloaded from the AXIS servers using HTTP, FTP or email to whatever final destination you want. When used with Chyron’s CAMIO system, it can be dropped into a news rundown and sent directly to the playout hardware. But the output assets are hardware independent and could be sent to any device. AXIS benefits from being a SaaS web service because it can be accessed from anywhere on the Internet with just a browser which means more people can use it and from more places. It enables content creation from the field, telecommuting and easy collaboration among different users. Centralized storage of all the assets means that they are easier to protect, back up and share. You create a set of graphics for today’s top news stories once and using them across multiple stations in your broadcast group or network. Having AXIS online also means that it is easily integrated into the various data sources, web based map data, weather data, and stock quotes are available to the application online. Only one connection needs to be maintained, and that one is maintained by the SaaS vendor. This reduces your maintenance and other overhead costs, increases your speed and efficiency in getting great graphics to air.

Fig. 2 Building News Graphics with AXIS SaaS

A SAAS CASE STUDY Gannett Broadcasting recently centralized its graphics production across 23 television stations using the benefits of SaaS at the core of that endeavor. It is a great example of how SaaS can help broadcast production workflows change for the better, creating better content while saving time and money. It also shows how the transition can be fast and smooth.

Fig.3 - Web Interface for Graphics Assembly

Tiffani Lupenski, Executive Producer at 9News, KUSA-TV, Denver, is part of the Gannett TV Stations group and talks about their experiences adopting AXIS over the past four months. She describes KUSA as a “very, very graphics intensive station” and says that the reaction to the program was different across the various Gannett stations. According to Lupenski, “In short, stations that didn’t have a lot of graphic capability loved it right away because they instantly got so much more capability than they ever had before. For those who are already doing a lot of graphics, there’s more of a learning curve to get up to speed, but once you get there you can really begin to exploit its capabilities at a higher level.” How graphics intensive is KUSA? Lupenski said, “I personally make 5-10 graphics per day using AXIS. My 10 o’clock producer is extraordinarily graphics focused and will probably use 10-15 alone, and that doesn’t count our OTS’s for every story … anywhere from 10-20 stories per newscast. Other graphics are full screens, mugs, charts, maps. We particularly like the bar graph and pie chart functions, which we’re having quite a bit of fun with right now. So, if you add up all of the OTS’s, the banners and everything else, you’re looking at around 25-35 AXIS graphics per show, and we produce 10 hours of news per day.”

KUSA obviously had high expectations and high demands for their look, and so were very thorough in their evaluation of what AXIS could do for them. Gannett in general worked very closely with Chyron, the SaaS vendor, to improve the product and ensure that it was tailored to their needs. Training is an important part of any new product introduction. KUSA wanted to make it a collaborative process. “We really felt like it should be an entire newsroom effort”, said Lupenski. KUSA established a broad-based training program to teach reporters, anchors, assignment desk editors, producers, and photographers how to use the system. Lupenski adds, “Those of us who use it more frequently are a little more efficient with it, but there are now literally dozens of people in our newsroom who can make a map, build a full screen graphic or get a mug shot on the air in pretty short order. “Initially there was skepticism by some about the idea of having to rely on SaaS to generate graphics as well as learning how to do their own. Our approach to getting over that hurdle was a good one in that getting more people to use the product helped to eliminate some of that fear. As everyone well knows, there’s a lot of change going on in the industry as a whole right now where a lot of us have to learn new skills and do a whole lot more than we’ve ever had to do before.”

Fig.4 - Online Image Database

KUSA is now in a position where although it has a group of artists that work on bigger and more complicated projects, it’s no longer necessary to have a full time graphic artist on staff.

Lupenski added, “We’re seeing more and more ways that we can make AXIS work for us. I think that where people had trepidations about it, we’ve worked really, really hard to train them, with a lot of follow up, getting it into the hands of the directors as well, and field reporters who are learning how to use it more and more. We’re now absolutely in a place

And finally, when asked if there were any concerns about SaaS, primarily the common question of what would happen if the Internet went down, Lupenski replied, “Yes, in the very early stages of this transition several people were worried about AXIS being a web-based program. Their concern was that we would lose all graphics capability if for some reason the Internet went down. That fear went away relatively quickly simply because it never has gone down. And, we weighed the risk/benefit and felt if we lost Internet capability -- our graphics would be the least of our concerns.” CONCLUSION

where we can’t do without it.” Fig. 5 - AXIS Generated Map Graphic

In the past four months, a time where most new products are still going through a commissioning and training phase, this flexibility and power has already helped improve their graphics look. In situations such as morning shows and weekend morning shows where they didn’t have a graphic artist available, their graphics were limited. According to Lupenski, “That situation is now totally gone. We now have a lot more graphic capabilities and people who are able to use it. “It hasn’t happened yet – but I’m really intrigued about a scenario where a breaking news story happens, maybe at the weekend while I’m sitting at home, and I can make an AXIS graphic and get it on air without ever having to go to the station.”

This paper described SaaS as a new technology that has great promise. It was shown how the SaaS model has many advantages over traditional software applications and lower cost, and how many applications across many industries and consumer products are moving in that direction. A case study of one such application was presented that described the real life advantages and cost savings of SaaS in news graphics production. SaaS applications in broadcast production are still at a relatively early stage. I would expect that they will grow to provide yet unexpected benefits, as “disruptive technologies” usually do. The question then is not whether the broadcast industry should use SaaS, but for how long it can afford not to.