Yospace is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, a period of time that has seen huge transformation in digital video. We’re marking the milestone by asking some of our valued partners about their own journeys in digital video and what they think the priorities are moving forward. This week we’re speaking with Zak Putnam, who is Senior Director of Business and Innovation at Akamai Technologies, about Akamai's long-term partnership with Yospace, our future work together, and how it will meet the monetisation demands of OTT video.

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Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

My name is Zak Putnam. I'm the Senior Director of Business Development and Innovation at Akamai. I'm really focused on bringing interesting, compelling, strategic partnerships into our compute platform. And so I'm working on everything that our cloud touches, but media and entertainment is a really core vertical for us. And so I'm really here at IBC and working with our media specific partners on joint marketing opportunities, co-selling, and interoperability.

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I’ve been at Akamai for about 17 years, so I have been working in media for a long time.

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Yospace has furthered its partnership with Akamai by joining your Cloud Compute Partner program. Tell us more about the program.

We're very happy that Yospace has joined our qualified computing partner program at Akamai as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner. The QCP program, as we call it for short, is really focused on building a really vibrant ecosystem of ISV partners around our compute platform. The program is really focused on three core tenants: co-marketing, technical interoperability, and co-selling with our partners to tell vibrant, better together stories for our joint customers in the market.

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You’ve been a long term partner of Yospace. Tell us about the added value that Yospace is bringing to your media customers.

Yospace and Akamai have been great partners for a very long time. We’ve worked very closely with each other for probably going on a decade now. We're really excited about what we can do in the market together for our joint customers, specifically around our new compute offering. We think that Yospace brings a really unique dynamic capability with its server-side ad insertion (SSAI) capabilities, especially as our joint customers in the media space are always looking for better monetisation capabilities. It's really an important piece to the entire video workflow solutions.

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So Akamai being a classic CDN provider, and now with our compute platform, we're building this really interesting ecosystem of media workflow providers. We're trying to create the best platform of infrastructure with the best ISV partners running on top of it to give our customers the best choice in the market.

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If you think about the entire video workflow, all the way from contribution all the way out to distribution on the CDN, we want to make sure we have the best in class providers providing the best services for every step along the journey that the video takes from the camera all the way to the end user. Yospace, and the monetisation capabilities that it has, is an extremely vital piece of the entire workflow, so we're so excited that if someone wants to come onto the compute platform at Akamai, they have the option of running Yospace’s technology in a really highly interoperable fashion with our platform, in a way that fits really well inside of their entire ecosystem.

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We think it's extremely competitive, cost efficient, and really a nice way to like meet our customer's demands.

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Read more about our involvement with Akamai’s Qualified Compute Partner Program here.