Prime Focus Technologies Gains Speed and Agility for its Media ERP Platform on the AWS Cloud

Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) is the creator of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, CLEAR, for the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry. It offers streaming platforms, studios, and broadcasters transformational AI-led technology and media services powered by the cloud that help them lower their Total Cost of Operations (TCOP) by automating their content supply chain. PFT works with M&E companies such as Walt Disney-owned Star TV, Channel 4, ITV, Sinclair Broadcast Group, A&E Networks, Warner Media, PBS, Hearst Television, CBS Television Studios, 20th Century Fox Television Studios, Lionsgate, Showtime, HBO, NBCU, TERN International, Disney+ Hotstar, BCCI, Indian Premier League and more.

PFT manages 14 million assets annually with over 13.5 PB of total storage used on the cloud. By migrating one of its on-premises data center at a colocation facility to Amazon Web Services (AWS), PFT improved its customer experience by cutting average customer onboarding time from 5 to 3 weeks. It also shifted away from a capital expenditure (CapEx) model to an operating expenses (OpEx) model, which would help it save up to 20 percent on its total operating cost within the first 3 years.

With AWS, PFT can easily scale its storage within minutes, instead of weeks, to onboard new customers or respond to additional storage requests from existing customers. To process and store media content at scale, PFT deployed Amazon FSx for Windows and Amazon FSx for Lustre with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon FSx meets the performance needs for PFT’s persistent and work-in-progress storage, and ensures the content is protected and highly available with data replication across AWS Regions.

The company has also improved its disaster recovery capabilities while saving about 30 percent on long-term storage. PFT uses a mix of Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes for long-term, durable, cost-effective data archival and fast retrieval of content. Within a few months of the migration, PFT digitized and uploaded 8-9 petabtyes of data from tape storage to the cloud.

PFT has also freed 10 percent of time previously spent on routine maintenance. The company runs Amazon Relational Database Service for SQL Server to automate administrative tasks such as backups, point-in-time snapshots, and security policies. Furthermore, PFT upgraded its now-deprecated SQL Server 2008 R2 database to a new version with minimal compatibility issues and changes.

AWS also helped PFT launch a AWS Control Tower to better govern its multi-tenant architecture. The company can now centrally provision all its accounts, rapidly set up and configure its multi-account AWS environment, and define permissions across accounts through its Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies.

Through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), PFT saved on 15 percent of its migration expenses, as AWS offset some costs incurred to maintain both its on-premises and cloud environments during the transition.

PFT also worked with Technical Account Managers (TAMs) from the AWS Enterprise On-Ramp team to manage the migration process, through the use of AWS Infrastructure Event Management. The operational support resulted in a successful migration within the scheduled downtime. Additionally, PFT tapped on AWS resources like partners to further upskill its team. 

“With AWS’s help, we were able to seamlessly migrate live applications and assets for 25 of our customers while still meeting our service level agreements,” says Rajasekar Pavuluri, Vice President of CloudOps and DevOps at PFT. “During the migration, we realized we needed a larger Amazon RDS instance than initially planned. Rather than cancel and reschedule the migration, the AWS team helped us provision the next available size within an hour, allowing us to complete the migration within the planned downtime.”

Following this success, PFT decided to sign a second MAP and began migrating its Los Angeles data center.

By integrating AWS Elemental MediaConvert into CLEAR, PFT helped customers speed up the processing of content for distribution . Its customers can now easily prepare its content for delivery to multiple screen types, while meeting the transcoding requirements of different regions.

To improve its agility in responding to customer needs, the company also plans to migrate from a monolithic architecture to microservices using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

“Our close collaboration with AWS gives us the confidence to enhance our services on CLEAR and support our clients on their journey to the cloud,” says Saumya Dwivedi, Executive Vice President of Partnerships and Alliances. “We can now better oversee our customers’ multi-platform content operations—and enable them to focus on creating content more efficiently.”

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