Dell today announced Dell Create, Multi-Vendor Cloud for Content Creators, a new professional service designed to help large broadcast companies, studios, creative shops and other media and entertainment customers dramatically improve their content workflows with a centralized IT environment. Dell Create helps customers reduce operational costs and increase efficiencies through the Dell-managed organization and implementation of a customized combination of customer-approved vendor solutions, carefully selected to operate seamlessly together to meet the unique needs of each customer.  This helps customers do more of what they do best and spend more time being creative.   

Today, most broadcast companies, studios or creative shops manage the creation and/or distribution of content themselves. These processes require the orchestration of many areas of specialized expertise, from business process management to unique video-related tasks. Each of these niche areas is generally serviced by different vendors that have their own platforms and applications. As a result, companies are required to constantly re-invent their workflow process to get the disparate technologies and processes to work well together.  This cumbersome process plagues most businesses with inefficiencies, lack of standards and redundancy. 

Dell Create is designed to help customers save money and have more time to focus on the creative process by providing them with a converged hardware and software data center model, as opposed to traditional workflow silos. 

“Studios and broadcasters face a transformation challenge that will reward having a centralized, scalable approach for their systems architecture,” said Adrian Drury, Lead analyst, Media & Broadcast, Ovum. “This will enable them to be operationally agile in the face of a rapidly transforming and increasingly complex and fragmented market.  The challenge is that vendor landscape in the premium video industry is highly fragmented, defined by specialist solutions engineered for defined production and distribution workflow processes. As studios and broadcasters embark on their transformation challenge, there is a need for cloud platforms that are engineered for the specific security, file size and latency requirements of this industry, while presenting a unified architecture that can give studios and broadcasters the platform to survive and thrive in the transition ahead."

“Dell Create is based on direct customer feedback and the pain points those customers experience in the workflow process,” said Chad Andrews, Dell Media & Entertainment vertical strategist. “Dell Create offers customers a COMPASS (Collaborative Multi-vendor Platform-as-a-Service) computing model that enables customers to benefit from an ecosystem of best-of-breed vendors that share a pool of common technical resources, dramatically reducing costs and eliminating redundancy.” 

Dell Create services include the following steps:

1. Dell gains a firm understanding of the customer environment and opportunity to improve and modernize. Dell leverages key system integrators and developers to analyze the customer’s IT environment. 
2. Dell recommends the best workflow based on the customer’s needs and business goals. This recommendation includes a custom framework that integrates the right media and entertainment vendors for each customer’s unique requirements.
3. Dell then develops a recommendation for and helps implement an up-to-date, networked infrastructure based on customer direction and to adequately support the new streamlined workflow.

Customers in the media and entertainment industry focus on a variety of content-related tasks, spanning from content creation and management to digital rights management and distribution to the need for more dynamic multi-device applications. Dell is in the unique position to support each of these unique needs from both the services and hardware perspective. Affordable and customizable offerings available through the Dell Create solution include a variety of elements from Dell’s services, security, hardware and software offerings:

• Dell Fluid FS for video storage
• Dell Wysethin clients for secure, reliable and cost-effective computing
• Dell Services & Solutions for hardware orchestration
• Dell PowerEdge C servers for rendering
• Dell Precision workstations for high performance content creation
• Dell UltraSharp monitors for high-end visualization
• Dell SonicWALL and Dell Quest for security

As showcased at NAB Show 2013, in the Dell portion of the StudioXperience Sponsored by Intel Booth - SL9610, a number of media technology providers have already embraced the Dell Create vision, further enhancing the vendor ecosystem available to Dell customers. The complete Dell Create solution is demonstrated in the booth with the following vendor examples: 

• 5th Kind: Offers local and cloud-based production asset management and secure collaborative workflow solutions for feature films, studios, broadcast and other creative industries
• ANNOVA Systems: Provides a comprehensive Newsroom software solution called OpenMedia. OpenMedia provides a central collection news repository and helps journalists and interactive content producers coordinate, collaborate and streamline news production for broadcast TV, Web, Internet, Social Media and Radio distribution
• Brevity: Breakthrough technology within the Dell Create solution designed to highly accelerate the transport of digital files while enabling the simultaneous delivery in multiple formats to multiple locations as a seamless process, resulting in increased efficiency in media workflows for unmatched return on investment
• Crossroads Systems: Supplements Dell’s Fluid FS solution with its StrongBox solution that offers data protection and long-term data retention as shared storage that seamlessly combines the speed and accessibility of disk with the reliability and economy of LTFS tape – helping Crossroads Systems customers reduce archive and preservation costs by up to 90 percent
• Digital Rapids: Leverages its Kayak platform to connect third party vendor solutions on the backend while providing an intuitive workflow interface on the frontend  
• GreenButton: Provides a middleware solution alongside Dell, illustrating how customers can benefit from the economy of cloud or off-premise infrastructure, instead of the traditional need to invest the implementation and maintenance of an onsite datacenter
• Integrated Media Technologies (IMT): Serves as Dell’s lead design and integration consultant
• Kaazing: Provides new interactive content delivery experiences that extend from the Dell Create framework, leveraging the Kaazing WebSocket Gateway technology to power real-time, reliable, secure connections over the Web between customer datacenters and mobile devices
• Mediasmiths: Provides industry-specific workflow design, solutions architecture, training, change and software development expertise
• Vidispine: Serves as Dell’s preferred framework for organizing digital assets and managing centralized workflow processes. Vidispine is deployed as a Cloud/Enterprise federated MAM solution that includes ingest and transcoding capabilities.

In addition to introducing the new Dell Create solution, a large enterprise-level offering, Dell also teamed with Red Giant to showcase its small and medium business capabilities at NAB Show 2013. Red Giant leveraged Dell Precision workstations to produce its latest short film, “Spy vs. Guy,” which premiered last night with Dell at the show. The project, directed by the Webby Award-winning Seth Worley, used M6700 and T7600 Precision workstations with Adobe Premiere Pro and Red Giant’s newly-announced Bulletproof software to demonstrate that, working with Dell, independent filmmakers can create Hollywood-calibre content, complete with visual effects, with off-the-shelf hardware for a mere fraction of the budget required by previous generations.

“We chose Dell’s Precision workstations for our film because we found them to be an extremely powerful and reliable hardware platform to run our new Bulletproof software and Adobe® Premiere® Pro; both integral to the success of our film,” said Aharon Rabinowitz, director of Communities for Red Giant. “Dell Precision workstations combined with our Bulletproof solution truly provides independent filmmakers with everything they need to design, ingest, organize, process, archive and edit films with a single laptop and a small crew.”

Furthermore, to maximize the performance of digital content creation applications, Dell recently introduced Dell Precision Performance Optimizer (DPPO), the industry’s first software that automatically configures Dell Precision workstation settings based on the software the user is running. DPPO includes profiles for Autodesk Maya, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects® and other applications, and, once activated, automatically adjusts system settings to optimize performance. Additional features include proactive system maintenance and tracking and reporting of system utilization, helping designers, artists and other creative professional enhance and speed up their workflows.  

Availability Dell is available to begin Dell Create consulting discussions today with customers globally. 

Dell at NAB StudioXperience Sponsored by Intel Booth – SL9610 

• Monday, April 8 – Thursday, April 11
  • Dell Create Exhibit
• Monday, April 8, 10:30 a.m.
  • Director Seth Worley and Producer Aharon Rabinowitz on how Red Giant, Dell and Adobe Help Them Make High-Quality Films on a Budget (live-stream available)
• Monday April 8, 2:30 p.m.
  • What Metamorphosis Means to Dell (live-stream available)
• Monday, April 8, 6 – 7:30 p.m.
  • Dell & Red Giant Press Conference and “Spy vs Guy” Film Premier (live-stream available)
• Tuesday, April 9, 10:30 a.m.
  • Chad Andrews, Vertical Strategist at Dell and Chan Mahon from IMT Discuss Dell Create (live-stream available)
• Tuesday, April 9, 2:30 p.m.
  • Introducing Dell Create Multi-Vendor Services Solution (live-stream available)
• Wednesday, April 10, 10:30 a.m.
  • Scott C. Hamilton, Dell Precision Strategist, on the Advantages of Dell Precision Workstations (live-stream available)
• Wednesday, April 10, 2:30 p.m.
  • Hollywood Caliber on a Hobbyist’s Budget with Dell, Red Giant and Adobe