8
FUTURESCOT
THE CLOUD
28 April 2016
The Mighty Morphin
Power Rangers website is
delivered by Cortex from
its offices in Edinburgh
If you thought the
Mighty Morphin
Power Rangers were
scarily impressive,
just wait until you
meet the Edinburgh
team who help bring
them to the world
Cortex is pioneering
a new way of hosting
enterprise websites
wall from Seattle Seahawks American
football star Russell Wilson (the firm
was brought in to stop the Superbowl’s
website from repeatedly falling over
last year).
BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN
IT’S ALSO in the same building as
It devours data at such a rate that it has
become affectionately known by those
who work on it as ‘The Ripper’. It tears
up gigabytes of information, shreds
images and lines of code and deposits
it back into a new environment, faster,
leaner, meaner.
Technically, it’s termed an ‘ingest
tool’ but The Ripper sobriquet is much
more fun: a bit like the global legion of
clients Edinburgh-based firm Cortex
works for, which includes the Mighty
Morphin Power Rangers, by Saban.
When I catch up with Peter Proud,
the firm’s founder and MD, he’s in
good spirits. After 18 months of rigorous development, design, build and
testing work, he now has a platform
which he can sell to corporations with
a complex, global bank of digital assets.
It’s a cloud-based enterprise delivery
system which allows them centralised
control of their many marketing
websites with ‘near-instant localisation’. The ingest tool is just part of that
process, more of which later.
His office is also something else.
Located at Waverley Gate, on Princes
Street, the sprawling, open-plan floor
features cosy seating pods, a gigantic
boardroom and a signed jersey on the
Microsoft, a company Proud knows
very well, having worked for the
world’s third-largest company for 14
years. They are now in fact a client,
with Cortex responsible for delivering the enterprise architecture for
Microsoft’s global education website,
with discussions underway to begin
hosting more of the Seattle-based
company’s web services. It’s not
something I had expected, to say the
least, that a small start-up with 14 staff
(albeit with some considerable weight
behind them; WPP Group, the world’s
largest advertising company is the
largest shareholder), would be able to
control some of the digital footprint of
a $340bn company.
“This is part of the reason we came
into this building, because it’s close
to Microsoft – we’ve all got Microsoft
badges so we can get in, and we can go
and control their DNS. We can control
all of Microsoft.com’s infrastructure.
It’s probably a bit too much power,
actually.”
But it’s clear Cortex are a trusted
entity: Proud digs out an old group
photograph featuring him and Bill
Gates. We are unfortunately not
allowed to publish it (Microsoft is
very protective of its founder, and the