Spotlight

High performance remote rendering

DUX Soft gives its customers in the AVG industry a unique value proposition through its remote rendering services. Renuka Vembu focuses on the various solution sets that the company provides in the audio, visual and gaming space

DUX Soft came into existence in 2000 to assist IT/ITeS companies which used offshore infrastructure to provide managed software solutions to clients worldwide. The company was later bought by Amit Srivastava in 2005, and they started the DCC operations in 2007. The company provides rendering services to the Animation, Visual effects and Gaming (AVG) industry.

DUX Soft partners with its clients, and understands, innovates and delivers solutions that not only target specific bottlenecks, optimize performance and deliver increased profitability, but also provide end-to-end solutions to key processes within the industry, thereby allowing clients to focus on their core competencies.

Battling the odds

“As a US citizen coming to India and starting a business after 16 years, there were lots of hiccups. I found the Indian system almost anti-business. Every step we took, somebody would grab your leg. However, we were able to find good people on the way that helped us see the dream through,” recollected Amit Srivastava, Chairman and CEO, DUX Soft.

When the business was set up, one of the biggest challenges was to establish a commercial grid computing facility and then urging and convincing studios to use it and see the effects it can reap. This task was critical as well as an important aspect, and did not find initial acceptance in the Indian industry. But gradually the perception changed and projects starting seeping in once the company established itself as an industry expert providing top-notch service.

Being Indian and having conceptualized this indigenously, was a double-edged sword. While it was easy to negotiate costs and attract talent, it was also hard for many to believe that an Indian company could bring in so much advancement and sophistication and compete on an equal scale, with the West. Srivastava agrees that the mentality and perception of not all the best things coming from the West, still remain a challenging task.

In simple, the complex challenges that lay beside them, which could well be tapped and explored as an opportunity, was:

• First time setting up of commercially available remote render farm
• The opportunity of making available technologies that enable remote submission and computation of jobs on India’s first remote render facility
• Convincing studios for outsourcing their work for remote rendering

An overview

DUX Soft has shown a remarkable spike with its services offering that centered on infra and pipeline design, optimization and management. As explained by Srivastava, they have been constantly investing heavily into products and tools that add value to their solution portfolio, and have launched:

• SPARX—It is a grid based render farm manager. By porting SPARX on to .NET platform from PHP, it enables them to give more productivity out of HPC 2008 as well as address the large studio market in APAC and elsewhere, along with creating a model where workstations can be tied into server based render farm thereby enabling supercomputing on desktops.
• In Jan 2008, after evaluating other commercial databases, they moved their application platform to .NET and database server to MS SQL from MySQL. This, they felt, would gear them up for a more enterprise ready, robust server. SQL Server has proven to be foolproof and less susceptible to data corruption, and data recovery in case of unforeseen breakdowns is more robust. Further, SQL Server stores data in its native format which allows them to get the best of both techniques—SQL and XML. And then, SQL is tightly integrated with Visual Studio .NET.

The company believes that this will allow it to expand its existing customer base substantially because almost all potential customers already have SQL in their environment. This means that they already possess the skill set (MS SQL DBAs) to manage it.

In most cases, there are different mechanisms like backup and failover systems for business continuity in place. All this means lower cost of ownership for the customer. For DUX Soft, the ready availability of Microsoft .NET Developers and DBAs meant lower talent acquisition time. They can now start off the project sooner than expected. Moreover, tools like Visual Studio .NET ensure that they can develop the product in almost half the time it earlier took for the original product.

This is all set to benefit DUX Soft as well as its customers.

Some of the other products in their basket are:

• FETCHER—It is a sub-set of SPARX that caches compute data locally freeing up the storage and giving upto 50% performance on network rendering
• DREAM—It a simple Web-based software that facilitates easy upload, tagging, search and retrieval for assets and managing asset libraries
• SWIVEL—It is a SAP like product for managing production workflows and tracking assets. This is the node-based flagship product that promises to deliver unprecedented control over rendering, pipeline and compositing for studios. It is also applicable for Digital Manufacturing companies

Clients and business

The international clients’ list include names like Sony Pictures Imageworks, and the national list includes Maya Entertainment, Red Chillies, Tata Elxi VCL, etc.

The company aims to bring to the market more innovative products based solutions that address rendering, pipeline, asset management and storage.

This year, in 2009-10, DUX Soft expects to rake in revenues of $6 million.

Some of the key factors that contributed to the organization’s success in its journey have been the firm foundation it has been able to build in the industry space it works in and having on board some of the best experts from the industry. They were able to comprehend the pain points faced and the deep bottlenecks that lay within. They then worked a way round with their ability to generate product based solutions with last mile hand-holding and customized consulting services for an under serviced market.

Future roadmap

In the future, DUX Soft aspires to integrate its product based solution set to give a pre-integrated and pre-configured solution. The company is also looking at venturing beyond AVG into other HPC applicable verticals, especially Digital Manufactu-ring and Simulation and Modeling. DUX Soft is also on the verge of launching cache based storage products with predictive Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine that profile the user and compute job data and optimize the cache/storage performance respectively.

DUX Soft is en-route to opening up new offices in the US, Canada and Hong Kong. The Los Angeles and Hong Kong ones will function as the sales and support offices giving the company a wider and more localized reach into these essential markets for the industry.

The Canada subsidiary is being setup in Montreal and will act as the primary R&D lab for the company and take leverage of the liberal tax credit system there. They are also on the verge of closing in on a few important studios in LA and Montreal and have also put together a group of resellers and distributors worldwide.

As disclosed by Srivastava, there are two key product launches planned on a global scale in the coming months. The first one being SWIVEL, a digital node based workflow/production pipeline tool, which promises to become the SAP-like platform for the DCC, visualization and manufacturing industry. It is already been deployed at one of the leading studio in Montreal and they are also positioning it for the Digital Prototyping industry and are in talks with some of the leading automotive companies.

The second one will be PRIME, which will come to the shelves in the first quarter of 2010. “We already are signing up international beta clients for this,” stated Srivastava.

This is an intelligent cache based storage product which will bring the storage industry many levels above the dumb caches available today. At the heart of it is an Artificial Intelligence based predictive engine that profiles the job and the user, and optimizes the cache for best in class performance.

renuka.vembu@expressindia.com