SERHANT. is the most-followed real estate brand in the world, with a total of six million global fans spread across all major social media platforms.
Buoyed by Ryan Serhant’s celebrity status on reality TV shows such as *Million Dollar Listing New York *and *Sell It Like Serhant*, the brokerage posts regular videos to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and every other major social channel, on top of kickstarting an entire 30-person in-house production company called SERHANT. Studios, which collaborates on unique, specialized content with top-quality talent. They are currently in a full-swing expansion with new teams in the Hamptons and Miami.
“What we’re doing is kind of scalable—but at the same time, it's not,” chief technology officer Ryan Coyne says. “Then Alteon appears like an oasis in the desert.”
**Problem**
In the last two and a half years alone, SERHANT. has amassed more than 900 terabytes of media assets. Coyne, who has worked alongside Ryan Serhant for nine years, has scaled up the company’s infrastructure, racking and stacking new servers, ensuring everything is backed up, creating plans for disaster recovery and data-lifecycle management. They’ve hired staff specifically to handle IT and media management. But with the company approaching a full petabyte of data, Coyne realized something needed to change.
Coyne wanted to ensure they could seamlessly translate their success into these new areas while also laying a solid groundwork for further expansion. This required a shift away from physical servers and toward a sustainable, scalable, flexible cloud-based solution that enhances and streamlines remote workflows.
**Goals**
• Migrate assets to the cloud, ensuring a frictionless national expansion that protects the SERHANT. brand
Save company money by consolidating numerous applications into a single Alteon subscription
Streamline camera-to-distribution process by unlocking direct integration between smartphone cameras, post-production software and the content itself
Consolidate media so it’s easily accessible for all SERHANT. sub-brands, including its creative agency, education arm, sales team, software developers and luxury real estate brokers
Hasten process of retrieving cold-storage assets without having to coordinate with multiple team members
Create easier workflow for an increasing number of remote workers, freelancers and satellite offices
**Solution**
Alteon ticks off nearly every box for the burgeoning team at SERHANT., allowing staffers to transfer, organize and universalize files across all its divisions and locations. Coyne discovered the collaborative platform right when they began their expansion—the perfect opportunity to test its technology with new hires outside their headquarters in New York City.
“Alteon was the right tool for us at the right time,” he says. “It’s almost like hiring another person or two in terms of efficiency.”
Previously, the team relied on Frame.io, a popular review-and-approval software. It worked well for what it did, but Frame.io was too limited. They still found the fastest way to send two-terabyte files was FedEx, and locating archived assets required a media manager to coordinate with an IT team member to call up a file from one of their hundreds of servers housing cold storage. By combining multiple storage tiers (online, nearline and archive) with collaborative tools such as color-coded, time-stamped comments, Alteon could replace Frame.io—and also FedEx, FTP and other ad hoc digital tools they relied on. Not only does this cloud-based consolidation help the company’s expansion plans, it also opened up new possibilities for existing team members to work from home.
On top of this, Alteon will save SERHANT. money by handling many of the tasks once required by more expensive desktop and laptop computers, such as 4K editing and proxy transcoding. Because Alteon automatically generates H.265 proxies of every video uploaded—relinking those proxies to original files—editors can work on smaller, faster video files, freeing up hours of computer downtime, so the company can invest in more cost-efficient hardware.
For Coyne and SERHANT., expansion is about more than just market success. Their goal is to bring their special spark into other cities and countries around the world, scaling up everything evenly, in an intelligent, cost-effective way that maintains best practices around security, data-lifecycle management and everything else.
“We’ve expanded into seven new markets just this year, already with more on the way—and we're not breaking a sweat,” Coyne says, “thanks in part to this partnership with Alteon."