COLOGNE-Being a big ship that cannot turn quickly is not a ship you want to be piloting when it comes to technology platforms, according to Diane Yu, CTO and one of three co-founders of premium video solutions provider FreeWheel. Unless you are agile enough to grow while anticipating all customers\u2019 demands, \u201cYou then fall behind your competitors,\u201d Yu says.<\/p>\n
On the eve of FreeWheel\u2019s annual client summit in Europe, Beet.TV interviewed Yu about the company\u2019s plans involving the QA side of the tech business. \u201cThe problem we\u2019re dealing with, especially on the technology front, is it\u2019s no longer making a platform to satisfy one or two customers. It\u2019s satisfying a lot of customers and also at the same time making the platform extendable in the future,\u201d says Yu, who first connected with co-founders<\/a> Jon Heller and Doug Knopper when all three worked for DoubleClick.<\/p>\n In line with its founding intent to practice Agile development, FreeWheel is adopting a trend in engineering that has developers doing more testing work while delivering working software on every iteration.<\/p>\n \u201cA big change we just made at freewheel is that for the next three years, we\u2019re going to gradually remove the QA function as a function group,\u201d Yu<\/a> explains. \u201cEverybody will turn into a developer not only just implementing code for the future but also coding for testing as well.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a major shift in the sense that \u201cnobody has tried that with a large-scale BtoB technology platform yet. But are making that movement and it\u2019s going to keep me very excited for the next couple of years,\u201d says Yu.<\/p>\n FreeWheel\u2019s customers include the largest media and entertainment companies in the world, including AOL, DIRECTV, NBC Universal, and Turner in the U.S., and Sky and Channel 4 in Europe. Anticipating the needs of these companies as they try to unify their audiences and monetize content across desktop, mobile, OTT and traditional STB devices means always being one step of those needs.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, it\u2019s not as critical to actually know every single customer\u2019s demand because you need to anticipate their demand will always change,\u201d Yu says. \u201cYou need to be able to have a platform that can adapt to any demand the customer wants.\u201d<\/p>\n Which is where the nautical analogy surfaces. \u201cIf you build a platform and you\u2019re not flexible, you cannot not meet the demand and it\u2019s going to become a bigger and bigger ship you cannot turn around,\u201d Yu says.<\/p>\n