Middleware for digital files

"Our product is just one piece within a digital archiving solution, but in many ways it's the core through which all content goes," says Mike Knaisch, president of Front Porch Digital, a company whose flagship product is described as middleware, software elements whose primary function is to create dynamic bridges of communication between different applications and devices. hardware, which otherwise would not be compatible with each other.

"Any digital broadcasting environment revolves around video servers," continues Mike Knaisch. It's the first thing you buy to do ingest, encoding and archiving." These work on your proprietary type system that uses a special file format. They cannot communicate on their own with the storage infrastructure where the files must go to rest the files later. The files will be on the server for a few days or a week, but they will end up on a disk or tape. Within the broadcast operation there are also a number of applications for traffic control, automation, broadcast lists, etc. All of these applications and devices must be integrated in some way to form a true automatic digital media archiving system. DIVArchive is a middleware application that enables communication between applications and storage infrastructure.

Front Porch Digital in Latin America
"We see the Latin American market as an emerging opportunity for digital file systems," Knaisch said. We hadn't had much exposure to this market until the arrival of our VP of Sales Glen Green a year ago. Green had previously worked at organizations such as Quantel, Snell & Willcox and Grass Valley. As part of his responsibility, Green had handled sales in Latin America, so he comes with a lot of knowledge of the region and contacts."

According to Knaisch, in a very short period, Green was able to establish distribution agreements in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia, as well as a Miami distributor that sells in several countries in the region. "In fact, we already sold DIVArchive in Argentina to Tiba (Teleport International Buenos Aires) and in Venezuela to Puma Televisión Venezuela, a Caracas canal. DIVArchive also manages one of the largest media archives in Mexico." Knaisch says business in the region looks very promising and that he has between four and six concrete possibilities in a period of about six months. "One of the reasons we are well positioned is because of our experience in Europe. We have about 12 DIVArchive facilities in Spain and one facility in Portugal and this has some cultural relevance." Finally, the executive relates that during NAB the windows of business opportunity for his company in Latin America were confirmed. "We have had between 20 and 30 meetings with clients from Latin America brought by our representatives in the region."

The new distributors that are helping to expand Front Porch Digital's business in Latin America are: ADLine in Brazil, Hercasa in Venezuela, VideoElec in Colombia and AQB in Argentina. All of them have signed contracts in the last six months.

The first facility in Buenos Aires' Tiba will be operational in June. With the help of AQB and the DIVArchive system, Tiba's multichannel broadcast integrates Leitch video servers with a StorageTek tape library to support the flow of digital streams.

At Puma, which recently began broadcasting in various locations across Venezuela, Hercasa installed a DIVArchive system that will work with an Avid electronic news editing system along with a StorageTek library.

Front Porch Digital boasts more than 120 installations in almost 40 countries. By the very nature of the product, it is necessary to make alliances with multiple manufacturers such as IBM, StorageTek, Sony, Adic, in the field of tape storage, while in disks its allies include Nexsan, NetAp, Ipsilon and StorageTek itself.

"Seventy-six of those facilities work with StorageTek's infrastructure because it is the most widely used in global television stations. With IBM we have one facility in China and about four or five more in the rest of the world. With Sony's Petasite we have more than 15 installations." Knaisch says his company is "storage infrastructure agnostic," and spends much of its time working on integrating its middleware with the largest manufacturers and developers of automation, asset management, and video server applications and devices.

DIVArchive is a software that acts as a middleware to enable interoperability between large media storage devices, video servers, editing systems, and digital workflow applications. Diva comes from Versatile, Distributed, and Intelligent Archive.

DIVAworks is an appliance, that is, a plug-and-play device that combines a server of 2 CPUs, 2 TB of almost online storage and a library of 10 data tapes operated under the control of the DIVArchive software.

DIVAcomplete is a broad-spectrum solution, configured to support custom integration of complex storage and archiving solutions.

DIVAdirector is a distributed content management application that provides a friendly, web-based window to all content stored in a DIVArchive system.

DIVAmonitor enables real-time monitoring of a DIVArchive system and all connected storage and broadcast devices.

Finally, the BItScream transcoding system is best-in-class middleware software, enabling unprecedented interoperability between large media storage devices, servers, digital capture, editing systems, file managers, and digital workflow applications.