How the pandemic has fast tracked cloud adoption for publishers

18th November 2020 by Duncan Smith in News
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The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is forcing publishers around the world to rethink how they work. It’s become essential to transform the business with the reality of the new world we inhabit. Companies that have started their cloud adoption journey are prospering with the benefits of cloud infrastructure as they transition to the new normal. 

Traditionally, media companies and publishers have used on-premises data centers that house large numbers of servers to meet their computing needs. In the past, that was a configuration that worked: the data seemed safe and sound, and any problems that came up could be addressed in-house by the IT department. The problem with this model is that it is extremely expensive. Those servers take up a lot of room: valuable office space that has to be rented. These also meant you could only access the data in the office or via VPN access not ideal for fully remote working! For Publishers this is especially important with the explosion of On-Demand/OTT content, the limitations of what you physically can store with on premise against the flexibility of capacity and military grade security offered by the cloud could be critical for survival!

Ability to Work from Home

Even companies that were resistant to the concept have been forced to embrace remote working and have found that actually productivity is higher with greater happiness and satisfaction from their employees.

However, many publishers lacked the technology infrastructure to offer this capability which has forced companies to fast track cloud adoption and digital transformation. 

IT budgets flow into cloud

Polls taken after the start of the pandemic show coronavirus has hastened the shift to the cloud. A recent MariaDB survey of 559 enterprise tech managers in France, Germany, the U.S. and U.K. revealed that:

• 40% are currently accelerating their move to the cloud
• 51% plan to move more applications to the cloud in anticipation of the second wave that much of the world is now experiencing! 
• 39% expect to be 100% in the cloud (no time frame was specified in the survey)
• 32% are starting a move to the cloud

• Lower (or no) capital expenditure
  It’s a licence model, Pay for what you use as the workload demands, No need for on premise teams to manage hardware and networking infrastructure. Security being handled by experts with military grade facilities!
  https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/legal/misc/salesforce-security-privacy-and-architecture.pdf
• Shorter time to market
  With Salesforce you have an existing platform which your users have access to, so you just solve the business problem and launch, rather than selecting databases, app servers, web servers etc and building out the infrastructure to go live.
• Lower cost of operation
  Get your products to market as soon as possible, and as cost-effective as possible. Companies have a wider pool of talent to draw from as the software is widely available. They can choose where to allocate resources, geographically, for the best return on investment

5 key questions Publishers should be asking themselves to help with cloud adoption

It has become clear that cloud adoption technologies have become a key strategy for publishers to survive and prosper in the dramatically different we live in now, the new ‘normal’. 

Publishers need to provide the workforce with tools that enable them to sell, service and fulfil their customers’ needs wherever they happen to be working from! Additionally, they need to bring everyone in the business together! The phrase one single source of the truth is more important than ever with teams now distributed and unable to collaborate.

This IS the perfect time to look at how the traditional enterprise systems and workplace processes operate in the new ‘normal’, are they fit for purpose? Can traditional on premise systems even be justified anymore as the costs for this far outweigh those of the cloud, let alone the benefits and flexibility that it offers!

This is why it is so important now more than ever for publishers to have the right Order Management Systems (OMS), to take advantage of the digital swing and truly embrace the cloud! Empowering users with all the key information at their fingertips, so they can see all their customers’ activities. Their Quotes, their Orders, Invoices, copy etc. Working remotely for users is now the new norm. There is no going back to how we worked previously! Publishers need to embrace the new ‘normal’. The lean and agile will prosper and those that are not able to will lag behind, unable to either service their customers effectively or be unable to retain staff unwilling to have the flexibility they have enjoyed during this period.

Cloud adoption sounds easy but it will require planning and thought. Here at BrightGen we want to help facilitate this for publishers and have come up with 5 key points that Publishers should consider when looking to move to the cloud regarding their ad sales solution!

1. Are you paying for multiple licences for your systems, are they easily accessible by your remote workers?

Look for a solution that integrates CRM and ad sales management with one provider and reduces costs, such as Salesforce and BrightMEDIA.

Advertising will recover from this, so now is a good time to review your ad sales systems and processes. Find a solution that integrates your booking channels (Print, Digital, Events, OOH, etc), and enables sales to sell these together and intuitively, look at how the solution addresses revenue recognition as having a clear view at a press of a button and being able to react appropriately means your not behind the curve! 

2. Are you enabling your teams to work remotely, how and where can they access information?

The solution should enable your teams to be as if they are in the office working together, information shared by all and available to all, not in an email chain or in a spreadsheet, the solution should provide your teams to do all of this and more. This is a great segue to the next point below on the data and the 360° view of what your teams are viewing!

3. Do you have a single view of your customer and are you able to provide the best customer experience you can?

Solutions that are not integrated with your CRM inhibit the single customer view. With all your information in one system, teams have a 360° view on their customers and prospects, which can be leveraged for tailored sales and marketing activity. A 360° customer view will not only help you see what your customers have done, but it will also help you figure out where they might be going next, you can then use this data to drive better forecasts and make more reliable predictive analytics.

4. Does your current Order Management System (OMS)  allow you to react with an up to date view of revenue recognition?

Understanding and managing the pipeline is essential for businesses to plan and react to change, unless you have a clear picture you are blind to how your business is doing! But for true revenue recognition this needs to be based on when the items you have sold are happening not when the opportunity is closed, if this is a digital line and it is over multiple months then you have revenue in both of those periods! Understanding what you are hoping will happen against what did actually happen for sales managers and the business cannot be understated as to its importance. Many companies have long-winded solutions involving many areas of the business in collating multiple spreadsheets to get this picture, which of course is out of date as soon as it is collated and presented. What is needed is this view at a press of a button and in real-time!

5. Does your OMS allow you to react to new demands and changes as quickly as you would want??

The future is uncertain and none more so with digital ads. The move to a cookie-less world, the new anti tracking policies being adopted by Google and Apple, means change, so the need for a flexible OMS that can adapt as you adapt is truly critical for your future. You also need to be self-sufficient, not at the behest of the software company. You need to react without those constraints.