NAB Reflections: Avid’s Louis Hernandez Jr. on the Company’s New ‘Global Ecosystem’
By Jim Bask
So what was the big news for Avid this year at the NAB Show?
The big thing this year is the culmination of four years’ worth of work on the Media Central platform. The last piece to create a global ecosystem was to put the whole thing on the cloud. So we announced a strategic alliance with Microsoft.
We had already put some of the creative assets in the cloud, like Media Composer and Pro Tools, but now the entire platform is in the cloud.
We concurrently announced that Al Jazeera will be the first global newsroom to run their entire operations in the cloud using that platform.
The big thing is this strategy was to solve the industry’s biggest problems, and all the major building blocks are now complete. There are 2,000 global deployments of the platform, so there’s a lot of momentum right now.
It looks like the Nexis storage platform has been through big changes.
Yes, the last big piece was Nexis, which is software-defined storage. It can run on the cloud; it can run on any hardware. And the big thing here is, there was an IP upgrade that doubled the capacity of a user’s storage without the user doing anything. These things start to demonstrate why this approach to solving the biggest issues is so successful and so viable.