After working in the media and entertainment industry for two decades, I’ve noticed recurring problems related to digital asset transfers and storage.

Large studios might have budgets and dedicated IT capable of working with newer technologies, but smaller creators — individual freelancers, mid-sized studios or even in-house brand managers — simply can’t access that same toolset. The costs of modern technologies can be prohibitive. Often, companies attempt to address these issues with ad-hoc solutions like freemium storage solutions and physical hard drives instead of a single 21st-century solution. 

That is why I co-founded Third Summit. Our flagship hub for production professionals — Alteon Cloud, built on the IBM public cloud — allows creatives, brands and studios to organize, share and review their digital assets more easily. Alteon Cloud helps customers manage projects more effectively and replaces legacy processes with more efficient digital workflows.

Choosing the right technology

When selecting a cloud partner, our biggest concern was being able to power Alteon reliably and cost-effectively because the platform requires intense flexibility and ironclad security. Being able to scale the platform to match how much data users actually need is fundamental to Alteon’s design. The production industry ebbs and flows, so creatives and companies rarely need the maximum amount of data in all months of a year. To save them money, Alteon allows users to place lesser-needed assets in “Archive” or “Nearline” storage, as opposed to “Active” storage — but, critically, the user needs to be able to pull any asset at any given time.

After surveying several cloud partner options who could manage this load, the entire Third Summit team quickly recognized that IBM public cloud stood out in the field.

With IBM public cloud and IBM Cloud Object Storage, Alteon Cloud provides a scalable content management and delivery solution that can keep pace with increasing file sizes and moving assets while delivering a cost-effective pricing model. Flexible storage class tiers help manage costs while meeting data access needs and keeping costs low, which ultimately gets passed on to the end user.

IBM Cloud Object Storage supports cloud-native workloads, and the IBM Aspera high-speed data transfer option makes it easy to transfer data.

Partnering with IBM

Our plan is to democratize the creative economy using modern enterprise-grade tools — but scaled-down and affordable for mainstream content creators. Finding the right technology partners has been foundational to that strategy. Our partnership with IBM helps to make higher-value technology more readily available for creatives of all levels.

The creative economy contains more than 50 million content creators, and millions of professionals join the freelance workforce every year. We need to innovate the current way of working. That includes tools designed for remote work that leverage modern internet speeds, cloud storage and artificial intelligence. All of this points to the solutions we are building right now with IBM. And we know that as we scale up, IBM public cloud and their offerings will be scaling up right alongside us.

Get started with your free Alteon account today.