Leo Collins, CIO & EVP @ Citrix Synergy 2011
Contents |
Business Details
- Complex business, not just about making movies
- Business is about lots of motion pictures, lots of complex financials, lots of systems to support
- Films, TV channels, international distribution, diversified businesses
- Core business lines: film, television, library, channels
- All companies in Hollywood are interlinked at some point
- 3.8% theatrical market share in 2009 “the smallest major studio”
- Completely independent studio
- Make bets on contents…Genre, Urban, Prestige, Television
- 12,000+ library titles
- In past content filled up majority of the middle of blockbuster stores
- Put out between 12-20 motion pictures/year
- Have a department that puts out about a DVD/day
- Undergoing dramatic changes in media, packaged media has “fallen off a cliff”, being replaced by new distribution formats, all studios adjusting to this new world
- Business is dramatically and quickly changing
IT & the movie industry
- Movie industry is hit and deals driven
- Communications and customer service are top IT priorities
- 85% of company has blackberries
- Easy access to timely information is critical
- Home entertainment is similar to other consumer packaged goods requiring complex systems and extended supply chain
- Rights are everything…this is all you really own in the movie business, the right to show a movie
- Financial controls are imperative
- Goal is to take movies and sell them over and over again to same groups of people, and then extend to different markets
- Very complex processes behind the cameras
Major IT issues/Considerations
- Of all major studios, all except 1 runs SAP, b/c SAP handles title level reporting, robust ecosystem in Hollywood that supports SAP
- Major IT issues
- Consumerization – the development of people bringing their own equipment to work
- Virtualization
- Cloud
- These aren’t the only issues but they are the most problematic
- Few years back looked at environment and ways to save money
- “With SAP, servers were arriving like mushrooms”, this was a real problem b/c of limited space, cost and heat burden
- The bigger problem was deemed to be email, the growth in the exchange environment
- Ended up going with Microsoft BPOS product, much more Microsoft Office Centric, very successful project
- This got them thinking more about cloud
- Using virtualization to reduce the #’s of servers
Why moving to cloud?
- High cost of equipment and data centers
- Energy issues are a nightmare in normal business
- Multiple locations make the problems even worse
- Amazon offers flexibility, cost controls and rapid deployment
- Decided they didn’t want to be in the server business
- Decision process…went to SAP and asked them how they did it, they responded with Amazon
- Have started migrating ERP to the cloud…moving SAP to the cloud
- First moving sandbox environment, followed by Dev, QA and then production
- SAP and AWS haven’t certified it yet for production
- Have moved sharepoint and significant email activity to the cloud
Benefits
- Lower costs and easier to manage
- IT answer to the business becomes “we can do it” to the business
- Rapid deployment w/o overspending upfront
- No need for multiple sites
- Easily scale IT consumption
Where does Citrix fit?
- Can virtualize servers and apps, but need tools to virtualize end user experience and access…Citrix is that tool for us
- Common universal access point to all applications including SAP, Office, email, specialized packages and tools
- Everything new to them is put on Citrix
- Now putting SAP GUI up on Citrix
- Citrix addresses the consumerization of IT issue
Lessons learned
- Cloud is very do-able, haven’t added any staff to handle these projects
- Huge win for the business, but you have to market and sell it
- Cloud does not fix problems like configuration management and security…you can’t use the cloud to fix your IT department
- Need to address significant trends in industry and culture…like consumerization. Find a vendor that can help you do this.
- Have discussion with executive team all the time…why doesn’t IT work like an iPad
- Things will just break on you…have to be prepared for this
- IT expense now runs at less than 1% of revenue (0.75%)
- Cloud strategy assures them that they can acquire someone else and be able to host their IT w/o additional spend on infrastructure