Logicalis

Logicalis helped GridNetworks gain competitive advantage with a web services portal for its media customers to manage their video services.

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GridNetworks of Seattle is a leading provider of managed Internet television delivery services. Targeted primarily at media and entertainment companies, GridNetworks’ GridCasting technology allows media companies to cost-effectively and reliably stream full-screen, HD quality, video content over the Internet.

A startup company in a rapidly growing market, GridNetworks has already attracted investments from Cisco Systems and Comcast, as well as various venture capitalist firms.

To establish an advantage over its competitors, GridNetworks executives envisioned a flexible and user-friendly portal where its customers could upload and manage video content, view network status, track trouble tickets, set up and control service options, and conduct ongoing analytics of viewer trends.

GridNetworks has an extremely sophisticated technology staff, but GridNetworks Product Unit Manager for Content Delivery Services, Mark Madsen, wanted his in-house team to stay focused on its core competencies and decided to outsource the development of the portal project.

Madsen says he was attracted to Logicalis because of its experience with Java apps as well as its background with system engineering and custom software development, but he notes: “We didn’t award them the business until we had seen them think through the problem,” he says. “There were a couple of steps in the process. I was very impressed by the detailed questions they asked, mining my head for the requirements. They did a good job at that.”

Range of Skills
The portal project required a wide range of skills. “Logicalis has provided a mixture of system design, high-level architecture, deployment of off-the-shelf software as well as deployment of open-sourced software and custom application development.” Madsen says. “Their role covers the gamut from software development, architecture and system engineering.”

One of the key challenges that needed to be overcome, according to Logicalis Managing Consultant David Knoernschild was to “make it as easy as possible for a non-technical person to perform this very technical function.” Most content management portals involve several forms and check boxes and are notoriously tedious to use. Madsen wanted GridNetworks’ content management portal to take full advantage of Web 2.0 asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) web development techniques so it would function very much like full-featured desktop application.

Team Effort
It was a team effort. GridNetworks developers provided the core functionality on the back-end. Logicalis was responsible for building the business logic and middle tier to deliver that functionality to an outside web design firm that produced the web screens and Java scripts on the front-end.

“Logicalis sat in the middle,” Madsen says. “It was a classic situation: the web design team had no idea about the back-end, and our technology team had no idea about the front-end web applications. Logicalis had to be able to look at each issue that came up and say, ‘These guys have to fix this,’ or ‘We can fix that.’ Those kinds of multi-party integrations are usually the hardest,” he adds. “Logicalis did a great job of making it all work.”

One of the key attributes of the customer portal is that the layered architecture allows GridNetworks to provide customers the ability to build their own tools to work within the portal. “We didn’t just build a web site,” Madsen says. “We developed a true services portal and can make authenticated, encrypted and secure web services available so that customers can build tools for themselves. That’s not just ease-of-use,” he adds. “That’s true business flexibility. Now when our sales team says, ‘Okay we have a deal, but they want this or that,’ our answer isn’t automatically, ‘No, we can’t do that.’ Our answer is automatically, ’Yes. We can do that.’ From a business perspective that’s huge,” he adds.

“The portal is a competitive advantage and a sales accelerator, but, most importantly,” Madsen says, “I see it as a platform we can use to build an ecosystem with a variety of partners. For an advertising provider or someone who does specialized analytics on viewing habits among the public, for example, we have a simple way to say: ‘Here’s where you get your data, and here’s where you can put your tables and graphs. Here’s how you can integrate with us to provide your product or service.’ That makes it very easy to go to third parties and bring up new products and services. That’s the main value to GridNetworks.”

Madsen says he intends to work with Logicalis going forward to build new services that customers request on an ongoing basis. “We’ve been very happy with Logicalis,” Madsen says. “They’ve been flexible as the original project came to a close and have put together hourly projects to help with some deployment issues. And we’re already talking about future development. As we develop new capabilities, we need to make them available in the portal. It’s not really phase two,” Madsen notes. “I should just call it the next stage of development, because I don’t imagine that I’m ever really going to be done.”