As I continue to meander through the early stages of our software-development project, I’ve encountered a large measure of scope creep. Scope jog or scope sprint might be a more accurate term. What started as a modest, internal workflow project has been intertwined with a more ambitious, external content delivery system.
One company, one vision, two seemingly unrelated projects. As I’ve written before, we’re hosting and streaming content for the content system from the cloud, with one of the big public vendors. Separately, our internal data workflows are also being considered for the cloud, but we’ve been stopped dead in our tracks by concerns about Vendor Lock-in 2.0 in this case.
We don’t mind being locked into a vendor to handle what may be terabytes of data from the external project’s customers, but we fear lock-in of our modest amount of internal data.
However we proceed, we’re also not concerned about performance per se. Content is flowing freely without noticeable delay on the external project, and the internal project won’t be in anything nearing real-time.
However, we proceed with some trepidation about delivering content from the external system in venue-level performances. That is, we are building what may be a next-generation social-media company, with content flowing through our website but also in specific live performances in venues ranging from 20 people to 1,000.
It is in this area where we are losing sleep. We are delivering sound, pictures, and video in the external project, and are now looking at any number of alternatives in doing it in the venues. We started by building a rather massive, rack-mounted PC and AV system. It’s powerful, but heavy and expensive, and includes lots of hardwiring to projectors, HDTVs, and cameras. We’re now looking at what can be achieved on a laptop, but also on a tablet or phone, perhaps using Bluetooth 4.0 to send data throughout the venues.
These are not cloud-related issues, but they are certainly mobile and BYOD issues – and we are in any case relying on transmitting our data from our massive, cloud-based resource.
So here we are, with what is verifiably a small business with a small staff and budget, yet tackling complex issues that on the one hand scream for a unified approach but on the other will require several hardware and services vendors.
Oh, and in our rollout later this year, we’ll be serving our own devices (SYOD) to our customers as well. Our massive system comes in any color you want as long as it’s black, and we may have to settle on a single vendor for the OS and tablet as well.
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