With 88% of IT leaders re-evaluating cloud spending, on-premise infrastructure remains sticky as IT leaders encounter widespread business challenges

 LogicMonitor, the leading SaaS-based unified observability platform for hybrid IT infrastructures, today released Future Further, a new global research report which explores the infrastructure blindspots that have the biggest impact on business success.

With insights pulled from a survey of 500 global IT leaders across the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, the Future Further report details the mounting challenges businesses face as they navigate rocky cloud migrations, AI demands, chaotic infrastructure monitoring solutions, competing job priorities and more.

"For every business, building for the future starts with vision and insights. But without the proper tools, IT leaders are flying blind," said Christina Kosmowski, CEO at LogicMonitor. "In a world where hybrid IT infrastructure is here to stay, the LogicMonitor Future Further report validates the importance of giving IT leaders and their teams the ability to clearly see what's happening now to create the opportunities to plan for tomorrow."

FUTURE SHOCK: Removing chaos and cost from IT infrastructure monitoring tools
The past decade's massive emphasis on cloud migration has slowed due to emerging business macroeconomics. A hybrid IT infrastructure model now dominates the landscape, causing chaos between on-prem and cloud infrastructure monitoring tools. The Future Further report found:

• More than a third (36%) of IT leaders say their organization won't be conducting any further cloud migration through 2025 as those macroeconomic forces have taken hold.
• Budget cuts and cost considerations are negatively impacting cloud migration for 80% of IT leaders.
• Three out of every four (76%) of organizations with hybrid infrastructure have separate monitoring tools for their on-prem and cloud stacks.
• 74% of IT leaders report spending more than a full business day each week troubleshooting and reacting to incidents

"Our research findings make it easy to empathize with IT leaders – almost half of them only have bad things to say about their current monitoring approach. While facing pressure from their teams to get ahead of any issues, they are too busy fighting fires to get the chance to proactively deliver on the mission of the business," said Ryan Worobel, Chief Information Officer at LogicMonitor. "This isn't just an issue for IT teams, this is a business critical problem. More than a third of the leaders we surveyed said they have put off projects which have the potential to increase revenue. That is a clear wake up call."

FUTURE VISION: The impact of AI on IT infrastructure monitoring
While excitement about artificial intelligence is pervasive, especially among IT teams, research shows the underlying architectures may not be ready. With multiple infrastructure monitoring tools which aren't part of a cohesive approach, the challenge to implement and benefit from AI grows. According to the Future Further report: 

• Only half (50%) of IT leaders say their company's current infrastructure is equipped to handle greater use of AI.
• IT leaders grasp the immense potential of the technology, and even have a shortlist of desired outcomes it could help tackle. Two in five want to see AI provide recommendations for next steps they can take to resolve incidents.

FUTURE PROOF: The freedom to innovate and focus on long-term results
With the current structure of on-prem and cloud IT infrastructure monitoring, teams are constantly reacting, troubleshooting and on the receiving end of complaints, demands and blame. Leaders are constantly in fight-or-flight, leading to employee burnout and high turnover rates. The Future Further report found that IT leaders are happiest at their jobs when they have interesting, innovative work. Specifically:

• While respondents have ideas for how to solve business problems using their data, 74% say they lack the time and resources to turn those ideas into meaningful action.
• Perhaps most alarming: 35% of IT leaders say they've put off projects that increase revenue to instead focus on responding to incidents.

With a cohesive IT infrastructure monitoring approach and a solution which pairs intelligence with alerts, teams will no longer be chronically put in a reactive position. By gaining full observability into their IT across clouds, networks and data centers, businesses will have the ability to see how their technology is connected to the customer, ultimately positioning companies for long term resiliency and growth.

Upgrades its filter to be capable of identifying 40+ types of IVT

MediaGo, a deep learning-based intelligent advertising platform under the Baidu Global Business Unit, today announced a global partnership with Pixalate, the world's leading technology cross-platform ad fraud detection and prevention, to provide advertisers high-quality traffic inventory and foster fairness and transparency in ad market transactions.

Leveraging data from Pixalate, MediaGo utilizes big data analysis and deep learning capabilities to generate traffic interception rules to mitigate suspicious advertising activity.

With its proprietary identification technology, as well as data and analytics services from Pixalate, MediaGo's upgraded, deep learning-based invalid traffic (IVT) filter strengthens the protection of advertising inventory against fraud including botnets, malware, high-risk devices and data centers. For example, MediaGo can identify non-human website traffic from major cloud providers and small data centers.

Following MediaGo's strategic investments for advertising quality, ad viewability rates improved by approximately 20% in Q2 2023.

"The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) project estimates that over $50 billion annually will be wasted on ad fraud by 2025," said Rena Ren, head of sales and business development at Baidu Global Business Unit. "At MediaGo, we're focused on optimizing campaigns for return on ad spend, and by leveraging Baidu's technical innovation, we address this critical need, optimize our anti-fraud system and provide advertisers with secure reliable traffic – enhancing advertising effectiveness and ultimately achieving our mission to empower business growth with deep learning."

Pixalate's Q1 2023 Invalid Traffic and Ad Fraud Benchmarks Report found that global programmatic advertising IVT rates increased 20%, proving that reducing ad fraud is integral to delivering high-performing campaigns for advertisers and optimizing publisher revenue.

MediaGo's anti-fraud system identifies abnormal clicks, invalid impressions and other suspicious activity, intercepts them in real-time and feeds them into the system's deep learning model for training, providing real-time feedback to the bidding phase and ensuring exclusive, high-quality inventory directly from MediaGo's various media platform collaborations. This results in genuine exposure, clicks and maximized returns for advertisers.

"Pixalate is thrilled to partner with a global company like Baidu," said Jalal Nasir, CEO of Pixalate. "Our collaboration enhances MediaGo's ability to combat the advanced ad fraud activity that plagues programmatic advertising."

Revolutionary Cloud Storage Solution Elevates Collaborative Editing with Intelligent In-App Caching

LucidLink, a pioneer in high-performance remote collaboration for the world's largest studios, brands, and creative professionals, is showcasing its first integration for a creative application at IBC 2023. The first integration of Lucidlink Filespaces within a creative tool is now available for Adobe® Premiere® Pro video editing software, allowing creative editors to preemptively cache just the media needed in their edit, directly within the Premiere Pro application.

With this new integration within Adobe Premiere Pro, creative editors can now either pin just the clips needed within their sequence or if more precision is needed, cache the clip ranges found within their edit, thus giving editors a faster and more performant experience. The LucidLink Panel for Premiere Pro marks the flagship launch of a series of integrations designed to seamlessly integrate with the Adobe Creative Cloud® ecosystem. Unlike conventional methods that require painful downloads and time-consuming transfers, LucidLink has revolutionized the media and entertainment industry by streaming precisely the essential data that is needed by any creative tool. The all-new LucidLink integration with Premiere Pro brings intelligent, sequence-aware caching directly into the editing tool. By taking away the need to pin entire folders on a desktop level, the LucidLink Panel for Premiere Pro enables creatives to effortlessly pin and cache only the relevant content needed by the editing timeline.

Bringing LucidLink's unique caching technology front and center to the creative user can, for example, empower an editor to work with high-resolution media despite poor internet speeds, and without breaking known and familiar collaborative workflows. All of this is possible without downloading and duplicating their media. This is the unique value that LucidLink brings to global creatives everywhere.

Additional Key Features of the LucidLink Panel for Adobe Premiere Pro Include:

• Proxy and High-Resolution Workflow Intelligence: Users can tailor their cache to high-res, proxy, or both, ensuring a seamless offline to online editorial workflow without needing to download or duplicate enormous amounts of camera-original.
• Optimized Performance: Effortlessly optimize Premiere Pro settings for peak performance with a simple, one-touch adjustment.

The new panel will also indicate when content is not in a Filespace during the pinning or caching process. 

The LucidLink Panel for Premiere Pro brings immediate impact to countless use cases. For sports highlight reels requiring near-immediate turnaround, the Panel allows for precise in-app, sequence-aware caching, empowering sports editors to work with the highest quality footage possible, eliminating the need to download large amounts of media on a desktop level. For documentary filmmakers on the go and on the road, in-app, sequence-aware caching means a high-performance experience even in the most remote locations, and without the burden of wasteful downloading of content that isn't needed for the edit. And post-production conform editorial is at last simple, efficient, and without the longstanding headaches that finishing editors universally know.

Peter Thomson, CEO and co-founder of LucidLink, said: "In the ever-evolving media and entertainment industry, LucidLink remains committed to pushing the boundaries of cloud-based collaborative workflows. We are pleased to introduce the LucidLink Panel for Premiere Pro, designed to supercharge the editing experience with dynamic caching and unparalleled ease. Join us at IBC 2023 as we showcase our integration with Adobe, offering Premiere Pro users unprecedented control of LucidLink data without leaving the application."

"Adobe is thrilled that LucidLink's new workflow panel integration with Premiere Pro will be available for demo at IBC," said Sriram Iyer, Head of Video Products and Partnerships at Adobe. "The panel extends LucidLink's already robust solution, providing one-click optimization of Premiere Pro settings and even easier access to manage cloud-based workflows."

Flomenco LLC launched "WorkFlo", no-code software making media workflow automation easy, fast, and affordable by removing development required for system integration, orchestration, and data visualization, reducing implementation time from months to minutes.

Today, Media and Entertainment content creators, contributors, and distributors manually manage interactions between internal systems, software products, and 3rd parties when operating their media workflows. Any automation is heavily customized and requires users to engage development and engineering teams to make lengthy and expensive modifications as business requirements change. 

With Flomenco WorkFlo, customers easily create automated workflows connecting their tools and services with just a few clicks in the WorkFlo visual canvas, and all under a low cost pay-as-you-use model.

"Media workflows are made up of dozens of unique business data and media processing systems, all operated by different teams across the enterprise, making any changes or additions to a workflow very complex," said Rob Delf, CEO, Fabric. "Every customer deployment at Fabric requires many integrations with other customer systems, which distracts from our product development. With Flomenco our customers can easily integrate our product with others in the media supply chain without any development work and we can rely on the Flomenco team to support that integration for the long term. It's a win for us and a win for our customers."

WorkFlo standardizes the integration of best-in-class M&E tools offering an intuitive drag-and-drop visual interface for connectivity that allows users to create comprehensive workflows without any development knowledge. The platform, backed by real-world insights and extensive industry expertise, permits users to select triggers and actions from a growing library of onboarded services. Users can also configure custom API actions and triggers. WorkFlo simplifies the complexity of data mapping with the same effortless drag-and-drop functionality used to connect systems.

Flomenco's out-of-the-box WorkFlo templates further accelerate the process of media workflow creation with templates for common media supply chain use cases that can be deployed in minutes. 

Flomenco's depth in understanding media systems empowers customers to connect systems and map data quickly and easily, reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and allowing for faster time to market. Systems are connected with minimal disruption and maximum flexibility, enabling workflow creation and automation in days, not months, and enabling the business productivity, resilience, continuity, and information insights sought by executives.

New Collaboration Product Suite to Deliver Highly Configurable Tools for End Users; Enable Faster Time to Market for Service Providers with Subscription-based Billing models

Evergent, the customer management and monetization leader for streaming and digital subscription businesses, and Irdeto, the world leader in digital platform cybersecurity, today announced a new partnership to combine Evergent’s flexible subscription and customer management solutions with Irdeto’s video streaming security and management tools. The new partnership will enable OTT streaming providers to quickly bring innovative, custom use cases to market, taking advantage of the rapidly growing market for subscription-based services.

According to research from Statista, the global market for OTT video is expected to grow over the next five years at a CAGR of 10%. OTT streaming video providers must compete for their position in this growing market by offering unique, customer-friendly packages and experiences. The new partnership between Evergent and Irdeto will provide these companies with solutions for tailored customer offerings, allowing streaming providers to quickly bundle different offers and services and bring them to market.

“Speed and flexibility are key to surviving and thriving in our current economic climate,” said Vijay Sajja, founder and CEO of Evergent. “With our partnership with Irdeto, we’ve found a company with common goals and values. The combination of our unique product offerings will make it possible for our OTT customers to design the services and bundles that will help them to acquire and maintain loyal subscribers. The subscription services market can count on Evergent and Irdeto for speed, flexibility and reliability.”

The new partnership will bring together the most configurable and easy to deploy solutions for subscription service providers from Evergent and Irdeto. Evergent’s suite of flexible monetization and customer experience solutions make it possible for OTT streaming video and other service providers to quickly plan, evaluate and implement new business strategies.

In the era of video streaming, Irdeto is taking a leading role as the trusted partner to customers by offering an enriched suite of end-to-end OTT solutions that help maximize the value of their platform and their content rights. Pay-TV operators embarking on a super-aggregation strategy (broadcast combined with OTT) can leverage Irdeto’s cybersecurity solutions to offer the fastest and most flexible and secure way to deploy a hybrid (or pure OTT) service on an Android TV or RDK set-top box.

“The synergy between Irdeto’s secure video streaming solutions and Evergent’s customer management tools will make a substantial difference for streaming video providers and other subscription-based videos,” said Doug Lowther, CEO at Irdeto. “No other solution offers the same breadth of functionality and ease of use. We look forward to developing this partnership and providing additional value to our customers in the months to come.”

Quadient, a leader in helping businesses create meaningful customer connections through digital and physical channels, announces the introduction of Quadient Inspire iForms, a new intelligent forms capability added to its Customer Communication Management (CCM) solution Quadient Inspire, following the acquisition of Daylight Automation¹.

Daylight Automation, formerly FormHero, is a cloud-based low-code platform that allows organizations to rapidly build and deploy personalized digital solutions. Their customer base spans across key customer-centric industries such as banking and insurance, including three major financial institutions in Canada. Both companies had been collaborating closely since their partnership announced in 2022. The addition of this new intelligent form capacity to Quadient Inspire will bring enhanced benefits to companies looking for cloud-based solutions that help create engaging customer experiences at scale.

“Gathering data and streamlining customer interactions must go beyond simple web forms” says Marci Maddox, Research Vice President Digital Experience Strategies at IDC. “There is now an even greater need to handle data privacy, personalization, and intelligent communications through more robust interactive capabilities. Quadient’s acquisition of Daylight Automation will set them on a path to delivering intelligent forms and trusted communications needed for digital business today.”

By increasingly adopting electronic forms to align with green initiatives and cost-saving goals, companies benefit from streamlined processes, reduced physical storage requirements, and simplified workflows.

“The addition of Inspire iForms to our powerful and award-winning CCM solution will give us an additional competitive edge and further help our customers create exceptional customer experiences,” said Geoffrey Godet, CEO at Quadient. “Our existing partnership with Daylight has provided excellent proof that our combined capabilities help drive sales, enhance customer satisfaction, and increase customer loyalty at scale within large enterprises. As Daylight officially becomes part of Quadient, we are now looking forward to deepening our collaboration and leveraging this technology across all of our solutions.”

The new Quadient Inspire iForms capability is available through Quadient’s usual sales channels, to the benefit of organizations of all sizes that Quadient serves daily with its comprehensive cloud-based Intelligent Communication Automation platform.