Al-Jazeera Spends $130M on Global Media Cloud Network
Al-Jazeera is a renowned international news network based in Doha, Qatar. The Al-Jazeera network has steadily gained more popularity, causing the news organization to grow to over 80 offices worldwide.
That steady gain in popularity meant that Al-Jazeera needed to reinvest in its technical infrastructure. Al-Jazeera’s solution was to integrate what it is describing as the Global Media Cloud (GMC) network.
“Our ultimate goal is to make sure that any user of Al Jazeera who sits in any of the more than 80 global locations will feel like they are sitting in the headquarters in Doha, so they will have access to all the resources they need, be it media files, accessing the MAM, or any other broadcast or corporate IT service,” says Mohamed Abuagla, Executive Director of Technology & Operations at Al Jazeera Media Network.
Al-Jazeera will use Skyline Communications as a vendor in this project. Dataminer, a platform used to ensure the availability of GlobeCast services, will be a key integration within this cloud project. The Global Media Cloud will bridge together diverse technologies from all of Al-Jazeera’s news bureaus and remote offices around the world. Al-Jazeera’s release says that Cisco, Net Insight, Harris and Riverbed have technologies integrated within its new GMC platform.
Ooredoo, the telecommunications provider for the nation of Qatar, will provide end to end services on the network side that will include an SDH core, MPLS and satellite links.
With Al-Jazeera’s $130M investment in cloud, the organization will be able more rapidly produce news stories and air them internationally. Employees within different offices will likely be able to take advantage of cloud collaboration services baked into Al-Jazeera’s Global Media Cloud.
Skyline Communications CEO Ben Vandenberghe was quoted in the release saying, “DataMiner supports media and IT services across technology boundaries. Getting the best out of a network requires unified media workflows, rigorous planning of resources and bandwidth capacity, an open northbound interface to any MAM and ERP system, and interfaces to many different network elements.”
