 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Welcome back to NAB day three. I'm Lisa Martin, we are here live in Las Vegas. Very excited to introduce you to our next guest, Alan Hopp, VP of Market Solutions for Avid. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. You are an NAB veteran. This is your 21st year. Indeed, yes. You must have seen incredible transformation. It's true, yes. Tell us about just, you were saying before we went live that you've really kind of been here at the sort of digital transformation. Walk us through that kind of evolution that you've witnessed. Yes, certainly. So when I first came here in 1996, the show was a little bit smaller and I came with a company that did nonlinear digital video editing systems. Not Avid, but a competitor. And that was really the first link in the overall production chain that became digitized. And so that was really the forefront of the digital transformation that we're now seeing play out and ultimately culminating with all these cloud-based workflows that everybody's talking about. So I've been watching it as that digital production value chain has evolved and all across knocking down one category after another and as I say, it's really culminating now with the journey to the cloud. Speaking of journey, this journey that you've been on in your seat, what are some of the things that surprise you still in your 21 for you at NAB? What are some of the trends that you've seen go from maybe something buzzy to a real key value solution? Yeah, yeah, so I think cloud was being hyped quite a bit a few years ago and Avid was there. We announced some cloud-based workflows a couple years ago, et cetera, along with others. But it's really just now at this show that we're really seeing it come into a more pragmatic, broader workflow solution. The challenges that the industry is facing at all levels is that they need to create more content at higher quality that is more standout in nature and that is engaging and attention grabbing than ever before because there's so much more of it being created and there's so many more outlets in which it can be consumed and it's no longer on anybody's schedule but the consumer's schedule. So that has really thrown a wrench in the works and traditional business models that people have gone through. And so Avid saw this a few years ago and we developed something that we called the Media Central Platform. The goal of that platform was to standardize all the disparate different technologies and bits and standards that were out there into one unified whole to make it easier for individual artists or creative teams like at post houses or even the largest media enterprises out there to get more efficient in the way they create their content and distribute their content. So what that's meant is Avid, which historically had been a very sort of vertically oriented and closed company, had to learn how to play well with others and this is not unlike what we're seeing from other large players in the industry, Microsoft for example. These guys have realized that in order to deliver what it is that the customers are looking for, again regardless of their level of the segment, they have to be open and play well with the perhaps traditional competitors or folks that you never would have thought would have a solid workflow. So in the case of Avid, a year ago announced that we were working with Adobe, which has always been a tool of choice for Avid customers, it's very common for them to have Avid products, Adobe products, but in some areas we were directly competitive and so what we ended up doing was we made it so that the Adobe Premiere product could work seamlessly within the Avid Media Central platform. This year we did something similar with- You got a big announcement at the show? Well with EVS we did integration, so EVS makes these arguably the world's best sports replay servers, those great sports slow-mo replay, et cetera, that you see on sporting events, they have basically become the standard in that area and so we wanted to integrate the workflow so we worked with EVS, they used a connectivity toolkit to create full-blown certified membership in the platform so that an Avid user can have access to the EVS assets as if they were their Avid assets, so seamless workflow all because that's what the customers need to be able to create this content faster and get it out to more devices. Speaking of the customer, you mentioned some alliance partners, so in your role at Avid, you're responsible for product marketing, alliances, talk to us about what you're seeing from the customer journey perspective as they're transitioning media production to the cloud. You mentioned some of the pain points, what's that walk us through, kind of a typical journey, whether it's a customer in sports or a customer in media and entertainment? Sure, great, great, so our big announcement at the show here was the partnership with Microsoft and the fact that we were going to be moving the Avid Media Central platform to Microsoft Azure Cloud. This is a really big watershed moment for the industry, if I may be so bold, because now Avid with her big alliance ecosystem is going to be migrating to the cloud and the more gravity that the cloud has, the more easy it will be for folks to have a piece of mind that that's a place they can trust and move to. We feel that we had a great advantage in moving to the cloud because we already had taken a platform approach, so when we say we're moving it to the cloud, it's obviously not to the exclusion of the typical terrestrial ways that people are accustomed to working. It's all meant to be complimentary so that folks can take a hybrid approach and what I mean by this is whether you're in sports production or in news production or in post production, you're probably not just going to wake up one morning and say, okay, that's it, everything I'm doing has got to be in the cloud because that's where everybody's going. I need to look in a very planful manner at the way I go about doing things and look at the benefits of what the cloud brings and be selective in terms of what parts you want to migrate when. And with the partnership with Microsoft, what Avid is saying is you could continue to stay in your traditional on-premises approach here if you want, you could begin to migrate things into a private data center, either still in your own facility or maybe down the street in a data center, or you could go fully into the public cloud. And that last one, it's interesting how many people have reacted. Oh, I don't know if I'm ready to put my assets, my gold bar equivalents into the cloud. I don't know if I'm comfortable doing that. But the reality is this Microsoft Azure cloud is trusted by every large banking institution on the planet. It's trusted by the United States Department of Defense. It's the biggest secrets and the largest assets in the globe are protected by Microsoft Azure. They've gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that data's going to be secure. And the same holds true for media and entertainment assets. And to really put a fine point on it, they went and got the Motion Picture Association, the MPAA certification for security, so they have all that. So it's as good as being in Fort Knox when it's in the cloud. So I really want to put that to rest. I mean, these guys, all they do is think about the security and denial of access to any sort of outside threat. Whereas most media and entertainment companies, that's only one of the things they're thinking about. They've got a lot going on, you know? And they are actually more vulnerable, even in terra firma on-prem only solutions, than they would be going to the cloud. So just a little editorial aside. Because security is a big concern that people at all levels of the industry have. It is. Certainly it's, you know, those in the technology space understand it's reducing as a concern, but it is a concern nonetheless. And it sounds like what you've just articulated, customers have the choice of hybrid as a journey or hybrid as a destination. Correct, correct. Right, they might never move beyond a hybrid state, although I would predict that, you know, in five years from now, most everything is going to be cloud-based. And once people start to see the scale and reach and productivity they can get, as well as the benefits of things like machine learning and artificial intelligence that are just going to help them speed the way that they go about doing what they do, it will be clear that that's the way they should probably be doing what they do. And that's all levels. And finding more value from the digital assets that they already have. That's right, exactly. And so that's the other thing, is once it's in the cloud, it's easier for you to repurpose and distribute, say, to over-the-top services, et cetera. So we were talking before about Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and Avid's role there. This may be- A tremendous amount of content, 80 to 90% original content, is produced with Avid in the last minute or so. Tell us about that. So Avid has grown up through the industry. We're almost 30 years old and we understand the pains and challenges that the traditional broadcasters are facing by these insurgent and incumbent newcomers, like the streaming services. But what I think is interesting is that those guys are using our tools too, as you say, to a very large degree. So we're very privileged to have the streaming services, as well as the 11 of the largest international news organizations using us, six of six of the largest Hollywood film studios using us, we're very fortunate to have all that great diversity of customers that have embraced us across various parts of their workflow. Fantastic. Well, it sounds like no, not a dull moment for Avid or you, but we want to thank you so much, Ellen, for stopping by theCUBE. You're now a CUBE alumni. I am, yes, great to have been here. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching again. We are live at NAB from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, we'll be right back. Okay.