One of the fast-rising companies in the industry is Signiant, enabling high-speed file transport. Dick Hobbs talked to CEO Margaret Craig about the workflows involved
DELEGATES AT this year’s IT Broadcast Workflow conference heard one vendor’s name above all others. Virtually every file- based architecture, it seemed, relied on bringing content from producers into the broadcaster’s infrastructure using UDP acceleration products from Signiant. Over little more than a decade this company has come from nothing to lead a new technology sector. “The company originated as a
development inside Nortel, the Canadian telco,” according to Margaret Craig, the well-known industry figure who is now Signiant CEO. “Their own research labs needed a way to move big code around
development centres. Nortel spun it out, at a time which was right for the media industry.” Today the company is
privately held by three venture capital firms, and so prefers not to talk about its size or its revenues. All Craig could be tempted to say is that it is growing rapidly, with worldwide operations including a substantial presence in Europe. Corporate
headquarters is near Boston, and the development team is still based in Ottawa, Canada. While it does sell in other
vertical markets, its primary focus is on moving media files around, from pre-production material shared between post
houses to the delivery of content from and to broadcasters worldwide. It uses either private networks like Sohonet — of which Craig is also a non- executive director — or the open internet. “Our high level proposition is in security, automation, and enterprise level monitoring and control, as well as acceleration,” she says. “We provide software to manage connections, and we work with service providers to deliver a managed service.”
Margaret Craig: “Our software
was always powerful, but it needed an IT guy to make it sing. Our new offering makes it more accessible”
Between the layers What Signiant sells is a software layer to manage connections, including the use of an IP acceleration protocol
to get the best possible speed out of the available bandwidth. Craig admits “our software was always powerful, but it needed an IT guy to make it sing. Our new offering makes it more accessible.” That accessibility comes in
two ways. First, the client is easy to use, and versions are available for web browsers and tablets as well as desktop computers. Second, Signiant is moving into a new business model by offering the software on a subscription basis. This will allow, for instance, a post house that wins work on a particular project to be able to connect with collaborators just for the duration of that project without significant capital costs. The model even works for
individual artists or editors. “For a single user you might