Ortana Media Group provides products and solutions for MAM, media, data and provisioning workflows across a range of industries
All of Ortana’s products are built using 3 distinct layers within our Cubix architecture to provide an often unique approach to being more agile and reconfigurable when compared to many other MAM, workflow, and orchestration engines. It’s an approach that’s been proven time and time again to be highly successful.
Many people ask what the difference is between automation and orchestration as many systems do not differentiate between them. From our experience, we know that it's critical to separate the two into separate independent layers.
Imagine cooking in a kitchen - with your ingredients as the assets, the interaction with the hardware (such as the cooker, mixer and so on) being the automation - and finally the recipe being the orchestration.
You take it as a given that you can cook almost any recipe you like in a kitchen, as long as you have the ingredients, tools, and devices to support it. So why should your MAM or workflow orchestration tool be any different?
We feel that technologies like Cubix should give you that same freedom - but you will be surprised how many out there don't! If you had a system where the automation and the orchestration are joined together, it would mean rebuilding the kitchen every time you wanted to change the recipe. This is where Cubix is almost uniquely different, giving you the ability to work with as many different recipes as you like by abstracting the automation and orchestration layers.
One of the key elements that makes our products a truly hybrid and almost infinitely scalable, is the use of its ‘Harness’ concept. These are lightweight and simple ‘worker’ applications that integrate with different devices and are often deployed close to where your media lives to take advantage of local compute power for transcode, transformation, distribution and more.
Cubix will manage and orchestrate content without the heavy lifting required of centralised storage.
Harnesses communicate with the core Cubix platform via a HTTPS API, and as such do not need to be local to the core Cubix instance in context of network design, and are designed to work over WAN / low bandwidth connections. They also work on an active / active basis, so for resilience we are simply able to run more instances than required.
These Harness nodes are all monitored centrally in real time, as well as being deployed, updated, and managed using our Node Manager application. Node Manager acts as a watchdog service on the local servers to ensure all required instances are maintained.
What this means is that Cubix can manage on premise media across multiple locations "from the cloud", without ever moving content to the cloud. This ensures any cloud costs incurred are kept to a minimum, and we leverage existing "hardware" on the edge.
Truly distributed, hybrid media management and data orchestration.
The Cubix workflow engine is called Taskflow, which allows you to rapidly build workflows using our drag and drop low code / no code workflow designer.
These workflows or ‘journeys’ can interact with all of the elements of the asset management and automation layers, to create a wide range of workflows to meet almost any need. Thanks to it being fully abstracted from the other layers - it can also be used independently for provisioning or pure data orchestration requirements.
The benefits to this abstraction? Unlike other MAM based orchestration engines - we can handle requirements that have no asset management. Our workflows can be based around requirements such as provisioning, data orchestration, etc.Our clients can cater to both the provisioning and media elements of a workflow in the same platform. Configure a project, and not only manage the media, but provision the resources needed too - all "just in time".
Most workflow engines on the marketplace adopt an approach of using a flowchart designer for building workflows. Whilst pretty for trade shows and simple workflows, Ortana knows first hand that once you get into more complex workflows - trying to render the whole workflow on a single two-dimensional screen is a mess. Imagine a enterprise distribution workflow, branch after branch, plus all the nodes within - plus their relevant links back to earlier branches...
Ortana approach the problem differently. Our Taskflow designer cleanly shows you the branch you are currently working - each step in the workflow listed, with simple navigation into the related branches. Still drag and drop, still no code, just without the headaches and infinite scrolling!
It also encourages a design methodology that focuses on the "happy path" first - before worrying about the "what if's".
Regardless of your use case, the Cubix architecture is designed to have a suitable deployment option to suit.
Cubix Yunify, Appliances and Connect can all be deployed fully on premise - with no cloud dependencies whatsoever.
This can include running within a fully "airgapped" network.
This is the most common deployment method of Cubix, and is supported by all products within the Cubix range.
This can include running all the core services, portals and database in the cloud - with control of content and resources "on prem" - or can be an "on-prem" deployment managing cloud resources.
For use cases that require on on premise management at all, all of the Cubix products can be deployed natively to your choice of cloud.
This can include any of the major CSPs (e.g. Amazon, Huawei, Google, Microsoft) or your own private cloud / DC.