Iconik is a separately branded and marketed product from the on-premise platform, Cantemo Portal, which is made by the same Cantemo AB vendor. Cantemo Portal is also reviewed in this web site. The two are separate platforms with different capabilities in each of the seven areas considered in this assessment, so a separate entry is provided. It seems that rather than trying to modernise the architecture and user interface of their on-premise platform, they decided to develop a new cloud platform from the bottom up.

ARCHITECTURE: Iconik is microservices based and natively designed for the cloud (mainly on Google Cloud, using Google Kubernetes Engine to manage individual microservices), integrating with Cantemo Portal for on-premise operations in a hybrid environment. It has multiple databases, including Apache Cassandra, and has leading underlying technologies (RabbitMQ, Elastic, Redis etc). Access rights options to prevent unauthorised access.

INTEGRATION: Iconik integrate with a portfolio of cloud based storage (AWS S3 and Glacier, Base Media Cloud, Backblaze, Google Could and IBM Cloud). The iconik Storage Gateway (ISG) is a lightweight cloud connector enabling high-resolution content to stay on-premise, while proxies and keyframes are automatically generated on-premise and pushed to the cloud.

AUTOMATION: Iconik appears not to have any user configurable workflow capability, with no graphical workflow design engine, nor real-time monitoring of workflows. Build-in workflows exist, including review and approve.

METADATA: iconik provides Metadata Administration functionality for managing asset and collections metadata. Permissions for ability to read and write fields is supported. Iconik appears only to support metadata definitions. No mention is made of more advanced metadata, such as hierarchies, taxonomies, or thesaurus.

USER EXPERIENCE: Iconik user interfaces are modern in style and look great. They are not too cluttered and have some nice features, such as playing and fast forwarding video in the browse UI (where keyframes are usually found).

ANALYTICS: At the time of this review, there is no mention of reports or analytics tools in any of the Iconik marketing material reviewed.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: iconik provides “intelligent discovery” that uses Google Video Intelligence or Amazon Rekognition AI together with their own machine learning to assist users to find content based on their profile, including suggestions based on what is trending, previously watched, and recommended. Iconik also uses AI to automatically tag videos and images. Workflows for manual checking of AI metadata are provided.