One of the top challenges for game development companies, studios, broadcasters, engineering companies and others collaborating in creative content is finding the right talent for positions that require high skill levels.

Arch Platform Technologies, Inc. helps companies tap talent on a global scale with its creative infrastructure in the cloud.

“One of the things that [our customers] want to do is go around the world to find talent but keep all of their infrastructure consistent,” said Laura Teodosio (pictured), chief executive officer of Arch Platform Technologies. “We help them by building connected facilities around the world on top of AWS data centers.”

Teodosio spoke with theCUBE’s Lisa Martin at the AWS “Enabling Collaboration in Game Development” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the challenge of finding talent, workloads in the cloud, its partnership with AWS and what’s next for Arch. (* Disclosure below.)

Moving creative workloads to the cloud

All of Arch’s customers have one thing in common: They are collaborating in a creative endeavor, “whether that be game development, editing in the cloud, visual effects, putting on a virtual production, that’s the similarity between all of them,” Teodosio explained. “They include companies from 20 people to some of the largest enterprises in the world.” 

The Arch platform acts as a gateway for taking creative teams and workflows to the cloud. The platform helps those in post-production, virtual production, visual effects, game creation and other design-intensive industries work together from anywhere at the push of a button, allowing them to run more efficiently to save costs.

“It’s essentially a control plane that sits on top of AWS, making it really easy to use,” Teodosio explained. “It’s a SaaS dashboard that fronts an orchestration engine and a machine-image pipeline, which allows customers to build these facilities in the cloud and AWS. Everything from VPCs to networking, to connection manager and broker, storage, build farms, render and workstations with all the software tools on it. We can spin those facilities up in 45 minutes.”

By partnering with AWS, which has the widest reach of data centers, Arch can easily support customers all over the world, Teodosio said, adding that “the breadth of services that AWS provides has allowed us to build a very complex and robust solution.” 

A different approach to the Arch platform

One of the elements setting the company apart is that everyone has both a technical and creative background, according to Teodosio.

“Folks either started or worked at visual effects companies, or were film producers, so we understand the content creation process from beginning to end,” she said. “We also understand where the pain points are and how we can leverage our platform and orchestration engine to really solve some of these problems.”

Arch also does things differently, Teodosio added: “There are systems integrators and consulting companies which will go in and build by hand bespoke solutions for a cloud studio, and they’re great solutions, but we do it a little differently. We build infrastructure in the cloud by software, so it’s infrastructure as code, which means that everything is repeatable, it’s auditable and it’s fast. Because of that, we make sure that everything is consistent, so if we build a facility for [a company] in London, its facility in Vancouver is going to be the same.” 

That level of consistency is what customers value as they look for much needed skills and talent around the world — everyone operates within the same environment, regardless of where they are.

“In addition, the platform is built in such a way that the IT and technical teams can build, monitor, and manage resources on their own, which really helps drive efficiencies for the technical teams at these companies,” Teodosio added.

What’s on the roadmap?

In the past year, the company started to support the integration of cloud and on-premises hardware and plans to double down on this effort.

“We can connect a cloud workstation to an on-premises server, so if you’ve got a build farm on-premises, we can connect the cloud workstations to that … or if you’ve got workstations or development kits on-premises that you want to connect to, we can make sure they’re all accessible by the cloud workstations,” Teodosio explained.

The company plans to expand its ability to work with on-prem hardware because a lot of customers want to move to the cloud in phases.

“They may not want to move everything to the cloud right away or they have a real workflow reason to keep resources on-premises, so we’ll be making a more robust hybrid offering,” Teodosio said.

In addition, customers have been excited about the platform’s analytics and reporting capabilities.

“We’re going to expand that out much more significantly so people can really, really dig into their usage patterns and create better efficiencies in their organizations,” she added. 

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS “Enabling Global Collaboration in Game Development” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS “Enabling Global Collaboration in Game Development” event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE