How to make media asset management workflows easier

Client: a Media Asset Management software provider

End users: content producers and content distributors

Solution: a media operations system designed to streamline content production, management, distribution, and monetization workflows

Oxagile’s team: solution architects, DevOps and performance engineering experts, UX, web, and mobile development specialists

Daunting challenge top of mind: how to resist the increasing intricacy of the MAM solution without compromising its reliability, scalability, and performance

Adjusting the MAM system to market demands: potential perils along the way

What was going on with our client’s MAM solution before Oxagile stepped in? It turned out that almost every customer representative had their own matter of concern to share.

Scalability constraints at every turn

CTO: “High seasons and a range of breaking news having to go live ASAP call into question whether our solution will resist heavy loads. At another point, labyrinths of system roles, dependencies, and interrelated tools are adding pressure to the system’s scalability potential. I’m afraid that our concentration on fixing burning issues instead of generating a well-thought-out scaling strategy will cost us new clients longing for tech advancements and feature-rich offerings.”

Minefield of integrations

Solution architect: “Each new third-party integration considered as the enrichment of our complex media processing ecosystem may pose a risk to its smooth operation. We should focus on architecture revision to achieve trouble-free interoperability of all components with no damage to system functioning.”

Lost in workflows

Director of product development: “We’re always aware of what users want to timely introduce new system opportunities to news production teams. With each new feature coming, it’s getting tougher for them to instantly navigate through workflows, as per user feedback. So, “How to translate a workflow tangle into a streamlined pathway?” is a question coming to our UX agenda.”

Lacking in-house efficiency

Software developer: “Sometimes it seems we’re going around in a circle even with minor feature development tasks. Inconsistent code as well as dependency configuration and build issues are growing, manual fixes across all projects block the dev progress, and this is not even to mention team overcommunication as a waste of time. An environment to drive updates and speed up deployment would help greatly!”

Oxagile started a rescue tour to resolve all the nuances of MAM software

Architecture audit and system upgrades →

Cloud migration by certified AWS specialists
Enabling system flexibility and expansion capacity with Kubernetes
Encouraging a microservices-oriented approach
Building a middleware so all integrations and component synergy go smooth

UX consulting and workflow arrangement →

Creating an effective UX experience
Structuring workflows to help end users achieve lightning-fast media processing and delivery
“Open-book” interface: clear, intuitive, uncluttered

DevOps practices for faster development →

Using Infrastructure as Code to eliminate manual code maintenance
Setting up an efficient environment to add up to faultless delivery of new functionality
Developing a CLI tool for the automatic creation of microapps

Alex, performance engineer, Oxagile:

“After we brought performance initiatives into our client’s processes, their system optimization vision turned 180 degrees.”

Being buried under continually arousing issues and directing all efforts towards their fixing, our client’s team had neither time nor capacity to invest in making up a performance optimization roadmap. Our team went beyond suggesting a set of performance testing activities — we took on the from-scratch process creation, which included:

Well-structured testing roadmap

Our specialists carefully defined the test scope and went into fixing the issues step by step.

Mentoring as part of collaboration

Oxagile’s performance specialists organized knowledge transfer sessions for customer’s teams.

Going the extra mile in system upgrades

Among the ideas already implemented are refining a logging solution, enhancing monitoring, and improving test coverage.

“Performance improvements suggested and put into action by our team have an equal impact on end users and the customer as we’re participating in capacity planning and cost optimization – all thanks to getting rid of all bottlenecks affecting their experience.

Let’s take one of the most demanded features, cross-sites searching, as an example. Thanks to a new umbrella search engine, end users easily manage big massives of data from one place instead of wasting heaps of time trying to gather the info needed across different websites.

Overall, the specifics of the broadcasting domain lie in their rapidity. The quicker you release the news, the better. And this is where our performance contribution plays the leading part, addressing response time KPIs.”

— Alex, Performance Engineer

Performance optimization in numbers reached so far

hours/year per dev time savings

reliability (less errors/crashes)

decrease in deployment costs

index scalability

faster response time

quicker search

Not a day without fine-tuning the MAM solution

As the project is ongoing, our team never stops monitoring that our client’s MAM tricky mechanisms and components run like clockwork. With a number of fundamental revamps already behind us, we keep solution’s high performance on track through permanent improvement activities.

“Don’t repeat yourself” principles are being adopted to avoid redundancy of software patterns while maintaining the current level of system flexibility.

Replacing routine with smart automation and a constant increase in system scalability allows us to successfully meet all the requirements to the media processing speed and functionality expansion.