SDVI and TMT Insights Partner to Accelerate Media Business Transformation
You might have seen the press release announcing that SDVI and TMT Insights (TMT) have partnered to accelerate customers’ integration and deployment of SDVI’s Rally media supply chain platform to optimize their supply chains. Andy Brinck, vice president for strategic alliances at SDVI, and Andy Shenkler, managing partner at TMT, provide their insights about what this partnership means for customers and for the broader M&E market.
What led to the partnership?
AS: While we’ve come together naturally — through the SDVI Rally platform and our expertise in digital supply chain implementation — this partnership really came from our respective clients. More than once, I’ve heard a shared customer say how happy they are to know that TMT and SDVI are working together, ultimately for their benefit. We’ve engaged with many of the same companies, and together we’re able to take a complete, end-to-end view in helping them succeed.
AB: True. With this partnership, we’ve solidified our collaboration, and we are positioned to extend those benefits more broadly. We know from our Rally customers that they are interested in augmenting their technical resources as they implement Rally. We also know that it takes a partner with special knowledge around specific media workflows, not just the cloud or dev ops. Our vision — one we’re already moving toward — is that TMT will play a vital role in helping Rally users to build on the platform and extend its capabilities and benefits into other areas of their organization.
AS: I think that’s right. It extends beyond using a media workflow orchestration engine. Customers ask us about overarching strategy and approach, how Rally implementation can help them take everything to the next level, and how it will help them transform their business.
How much of the partnership is based on technical implementation versus business transformation?
AB: In implementing Rally, customers aren’t looking to simply replace component A with component B. They’re asking fundamental questions. What can we become? What is it that we’re trying to do? Working as partners, SDVI and TMT can articulate both sides of the problem for customers. We can help them understand where they’re going, what changes they want to make, and the why and how behind those changes.
AS: Separate from any technology decisions, we respect the fact that every customer is at a different inflection point with respect to the cloud. We can’t ignore the customer journey. Just recently a customer brought us in to help them understand how to bring key operations in-house and take control of their future. They wanted to know what that might look like and what tools they would need to move forward. We immediately recommended SDVI and the Rally platform. For them, Rally was the missing piece. Fast forward a couple of months, and they’ve begun their implementation and are looking ahead to a launch. It has been transformational for their business and has shifted the way their technology & operational teams view their end-to-end media pipeline going forward.
AB: That’s a great example of how our partnership has accelerated deployment and helped the customer leverage Rally to meet growth goals. For a lot of customers, shifting to a media supply chain platform is a paradigm shift. Even if they are excited about the possibilities, they may be hampered by a lack of technical resources and skillsets. With the support of TMT, they can make the transition in a much more efficient way. They don’t need to spend time and money on building new technical skills so they can take full advantage of Rally. Instead, they can turn to TMT as an expert — and SDVI as a partner — and move ahead on their cloud journey. By accelerating that journey, this partnership is a complete game-changer for many of our customers.
And beyond that, because collectively we have so much experience building these tools and operating in the cloud environment, we can also help ensure customers don’t fall prey to complacency. It’s like that old Henry Ford quote, which basically says, “If I ask my customer what they want, they’ll tell me it’s a faster horse.” The danger that organizations have in moving to the cloud is that they take on-prem workflows and simply replicate them in the cloud. The problem is that they’re not really leveraging the benefits of the platform they’ve put in place. Success requires rethinking some long-held concepts —really their entire approach to workflow. If you don’t think and do things differently, you won’t see much difference in your result.
What skills and expertise are customers looking for when it comes to their media supply chain optimization?
AB: While Rally implementations tend to be led by technology, adoption is typically driven by a desire to solve a business problem or to enable process innovation. Working jointly with the customer, SDVI and TMT can address both the business and technical aspects. Our partnership accelerates the pace at which they’re using Rally, provides added value throughout implementation, and helps them apply the platform in ways they never anticipated. Along those same lines, feedback from actual implementations and from the experts at TMT bring value to Rally, providing useful product direction that informs the work of the development team at SDVI. Because TMT takes a broad view of the customer’s ecosystem, we benefit from added insights about how other systems operate alongside the Rally platform.
AS: Our industry has historically been very widget-driven, but we’re moving beyond simple systems integration and into end-to-end workflow integration and operational process transformation. With the Rally platform, SDVI provides the enabling technology. TMT’s expertise lies in advising customers on how best to deploy and use technology to achieve that transformation.
AB: That’s right. If you picture the classic triangle, you’ve got everything from the business case all the way down to the actual implementation and operation. And that’s unique. You just can’t get that anywhere else. Together we offer real-world experience at scale, and together we’re driving real customers — some of the world’s largest media organizations — to the next state of play, and they trust us for that.
For more information about TMT Insights, please visit their website here.
