Gaming and Enterprise Software – Linking Scale and Reliability
OMS SafeHarbor is at GamesCom in Cologne Germany this week.
In January 2009 we announced a solution to address the distribution and entitlement management needs of the online gaming community. A couple of our enterprise customers have asked us to explain any benefits they will see as OMS services gaming customers.
Scale
The gaming community has a scale that dwarfs (enterprise or b2b) most enterprise software distribution. Just a couple of weeks ago I was in a discussion talking about 2.0 petabytes of bandwidth throughput in terms of hours, vs. weeks or months. The tools and techniques used to manage this scale of activity are specialized and hard to come by. They also work to everyones advantage at OMS – If our core systems are used to entitle and distribute patches to 500,000 end users in 2 days, our enterprise customers have some indication of reliability and performance at their scale.
Reliability
Users of b2b, or enterprise software would rarely describe their attachment to any particular software tool as emotional. Gaming software is specifically designed to engage you at an emotional level. In a business environment emotional discourse is frowned upon, especially when dealing with a problem. In the gaming space, if you make someone wait 15 hours to download software, then they can’t install it because they are out of drive space, you may find angry vitriol on every popular game forum overnight, and a potential customer abandoning your brand.
Our direct b2c contact with the demanding, emotive, and fickle gaming customer translates into less exceptions and more certainty in the b2b experience (a typically more forgiving interaction due to the larger revenue and value at stake).
Scale and Reliability are the crossover benefits that the gaming market brings to the enterprise software marketplace when talking about software and license distribution.
