From the recently concluded Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, John Furrier, theCUBE host and Silicon Angle founder, managed to talk with Barbara Bermes, Senior Architect Mobile Web with CBC.

Picking a couple of ideas from her Keynote, Barbara Bermes declared: “We’re trying to focus on performance because we’re trying to deliver content to millions of people, and it’s CBC’s mandate to provide content programming in the most efficient means.” To the IT team, that meant focusing on performance, so they started to create a “culture of performance”, by setting up a bunch of tools that helped them monitor the web performance.

“Velocity is a great conference to meet people with the same passion,” said Bermes, explaining her presence at this event. It’s talking to people who are also performance-driven and who make performance an important piece of deployment and development.

What have you learned from this environment?, asked Furrier. Barbara seems convinced that it’s important to “find the right people” and “find the right questions to ask”. She advises going to these conferences with a set of questions that you are seeking the answer to, and then look for the right people to answer them.

The mobile change is undeniable. When the Mobile Team was established, Bermes was one of the two team members. The team is now 15 strong, so “CBC is noticing that mobile is the trend to put focus on”. The mobile market is growing very fast, admits Bermes, and CBC has a bunch of mobile apps which are being used by people.

Pressures facing Content Programming today

Furrier was curious if Bermes has ever felt the “pressure to publish” that seems to be present in the media environment right now. Publishing is done more on mobile, then there’s the processing, to get the real-time data, then there’s a Big Data angle. These are all services that can help a media company provide a better product, hinted Furrier. Barbara agreed: “We obviously want to have a good content management to provide that, and to also provide the proper templates we need for other platforms
we’re targeting.”

Talking about the importance of pageload time, Bermes explained: “If something is boring, or if something makes the user wait, it feels slower.” Pageload time is important for CBC, because “perception is reality” – as Furrier said. “You become what you’re known for.”