• 2 min read

Guest Post by David MacLaren, President & CEO, VRX Studios

VRX Studios has been in the business of providing photography and content services to the global hotel industry for more than 10 years and we currently work with more than 10,000 hotels around the…

VRX Studios has been in the business of providing photography and content services to the global hotel industry for more than 10 years and we currently work with more than 10,000 hotels around the world. With this many customers who are so widely dispersed, you might think operations and logistics are our biggest challenges-they’re not.
 
Today, our biggest headache comes from managing terabytes of media assets for dozens of large hotel brands with thousands of individual hotels and tens of thousands of stakeholders. Ironically, we’ve found that our large hospitality customers have the same content management headaches that we do.
 
Two years ago, we decided to take a serious look at this problem and try to find a solution. We started by looking at what was available from other vendors. A year and a half later, after several failed attempts to work with third-party digital asset management software providers, we gave up. Licensing a digital asset management system was not a viable solution for us. In addition to not meeting our core day-to-day content management needs, it was too expensive to license, set up, co-locate, support, and maintain.
 
Six months ago, rife with frustration, we started exploring the idea of using our years of content production, management and distribution experience to design and build our own digital asset management system-we were surprised at what we found.
 
Technology over the past two years has taken huge strides at making an undertaking like creating a brand new, enterprise-class, digital asset management system-from scratch-a viable and financially feasible option. The most critical advancement was the maturation of cloud computing. It presented us with the ability to confidently, easily and cost-effectively deploy a global SaaS solution without the hefty capital expenditures and operational complexity required to set up and operate our own servers in data centers around the world. This was key but we still faced the challenge of creating an enterprise-class digital asset management system in the cloud to take advantage of the access, distribution, scalability, storage and backup benefits that the cloud now provides – Windows Azure was the answer we were looking for.

 
MediaValet Screenshot showing main Categories page of VRX Studios implementation.

We reviewed every cloud-computing offering on the market and Windows Azure met our needs perfectly. Windows Azure has the best geo-location capabilities, enabling easy and fast deployment in every corner of the world, and it provides the developer tools and platform that we needed to develop a robust, scalable, and reliable enterprise-class software-as-a-service offering in the cloud.
 
Operationally, Windows Azure provides the monitoring, load balancing, scalability, and storage technology and support that will enable us to quickly outclass other digital asset management systems on the market today. Combined with our existing customer base and global reputation, we’re in a good position as we launch the community preview of our new, 100 percent cloud-based, enterprise-class, digital asset management system, MediaValetTM, this month.

For more information, visit:

www.mediavalet.co| www.vrxstudios.com | www.vrxworldwide.com