Prime Focus, Microsoft partner to strengthen cloud-enabled media suite

New Delhi : Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) announced its partnership with Microsoft to further strengthen its flagship CLEAR Hybrid cloud-enabled Media ERP Suite.

CLEAR handles 1.5 million hours of content, and its extensive domain knowledge combined with Microsoft's powerful Azure Cloud Services will create an intelligent, media-savvy cloud solution.

The depth and breadth of this collaboration is designed to create new revenue streams for PFT by enabling it to develop new products and services for the media and entertainment (M&E) industry.

"We are seeing an explosion in the creation and consumption of media across platforms around the world. PFT has been offering global media brands the platform to manage their value chain from development to distribution to archiving.

By leveraging Azure, PFT's is positioned to deliver even more innovative, scalable solutions through Microsoft's global, secure, reliable cloud infrastructure and advanced AI services," said Microsoft India COO Meetul Patel.

With traditional revenues shrinking and costs increasing on the back of digital endeavours, this partnership will enable content owners to quickly and easily leverage the efficiencies, flexibility, and agility that the cloud provides-made possible by PFT's flexible approach to virtualising business processes, content supply chain, and vision to build a connected enterprise.

Microsoft Azure also enables innovation by the companies around new media workflows, new operational capabilities and, new business opportunities.

The foundation of the alliance begins with the immediate migration of all consolidated data storage to Azure for uninterrupted service, before the migration of core CLEAR Media ERP to Azure coupled with Microsoft's Cognitive Services.

In addition, the companies will work in close cooperation on the overall go-to-market approach, which will help clients migrate to the cloud easily and more cost-effectively.

"Increasing accessibility and time to market for content creators is a necessity in today's fierce and rapidly developing M&E industry. Our flagship product, CLEAR Media ERP on Microsoft Azure will help M&E companies manage the content supply chain efficiently and create more time for the creative process by truly tapping into automation by CLEAR and agility of Azure," said PFT co-founder and CEO, Ramki Sankaranarayanan.

Combined with a full spectrum of capabilities and extensive media services available through 42 Azure regions across the globe-more than any other major cloud provider-Azure is exceptionally positioned to meet the needs of media enterprises and creative professionals around the globe.

CLEAR allows M&E organisations to manage workflow orchestrations across the entire content supply chain on one system.

It lays the foundation for streamlining content operations and helps M&E players enhance efficiencies across core processes like acquisition, review and approval, cataloguing, mastering, distribution, promos, and localisation.