Streaming Media - 2008 Industry Sourcebook - (Page 65) •• FUTUREWATCH: ENTERPRISE industry update 65 who’s driving this thing? Successful partnerships will be the key to success in 2008. by Nico McLane w hether it’s used for consumer or enterprise applications, streaming media is measured by the same gauge today as it always has been and always will be—return on investment. If you can push sales and show a profit in consumer markets, you are doing well. In the enterprise, if you are saving money or showing a well-defined transitional savings, you are meeting the business expectation. Nothing has changed as far as what we need to make the technology evolve, and looking to the future, the same measures for success stand in the forefront. We can expect to see three significant trends emerge for streaming media in the enterprise in 2008: 1. Enterprise leaders will work smarter with what they have in place and will deploy solutions that can be scaled up rather than might need to be scaled down (or out). 2. Enterprise leaders will partner with suppliers (who will partner with other suppliers) who offer the tools to enhance user experience, to capture accurate statistical data, and to make their own products work better. 3. Enterprise leaders will integrate long-term strategies and will work to view their IT landscapes from all angles. Convergence will happen over time, just not tomorrow. Howdy, Partner What is different as we look toward 2008 is how the partnerships between the technology leaders, advertisers, and publishers align and how the winning strategy will be defined and executed by the strength of these partnerships. The media players and codecs are not going to make as much of a difference as the technology partnerships that are being forged. As a developer and an everyday user of technology, I will still recommend to my clients that they build products that are resilient and that compensate for real-world use cases by developing, say, for both Windows Media and Adobe Flash player in order to fulfill the end user’s expectations and to provide a seamless end-user experience—as is determined by the demographics of the target audience. However, if I am hired by a client that has engaged in a partnership with Microsoft, I’ll likely be limited by the need to develop and produce for Silverlight; the same would likely be true of a request to develop in Flash for an Adobe partner. As a former enterprise department head and lead project manager for consumer-facing initiatives, I’m equally concerned about how the technology of streaming media is deployed and how well we identify and measure success or compensate for failure dynamically, before it takes a project into the red. It’s my belief that in the months and years to come, the technology will be steered by decided partnerships and by “funnels” of calculated participation— not just in the traditional marketing sense, where an end user is WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM
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