Alain Andreoli

BroadcastPro ME caught up with Alain Andreoli, the new CEO of Grass Valley, at NAB to find out more about the company’s plans for 2011

 We hear you’ve already worked closely with the EMEA market? How do you view this region?

Yes, my first exposure with EMEA was at Texas Instruments, where I was running our Middle East operations between 1985 and 1989. The Middle East is a region, where you can see a significant demarcation between the older economies and newer, emerging economies, and the last frontier is probably Africa itself. There are lots of positive signs around Africa. This market is really transforming itself for us from traditional markets like Western Europe, USA, Australia, Japan, where historically, we have held a very strong position. Now, we see greater potential in emerging markets such as the Middle East, Africa, China and Brazil, and need to invest more there.

Can we assume then that you have plans to invest more in the region?

We are going through a transition right now. One of the internal priorities of the company is to dramatically increase our investments in the emerging markets.

We have an office in Dubai but it is relatively small now and whether we will expand that will depend on the amount of business we have won and will win in the future. However, I can say that the company has had the history of supporting the Middle East and Africa more from Western Europe. Although this is not economically viable, this has helped to transfer knowledge to customers and so, it has worked very well. This will continue to the UAE but our ambition is to eventually have our specialists closer to the customer.

 What percentage of the Middle East business contributes to the whole Grass Valley business?

I do not know the exact number but it’s a significant part of our business.

You mentioned that Grass Valley will be undergoing a transformation?

By that, we mean that the company, which has a very strong products heritage, will gradually become a company that will be a good solutions partner to the customer. That’s a big transformation in some regions in the way we address our customers and the way we build our relationship with them.

Internally, there will not be a massive transformation as it relates to our product developments, where we believe we have great engineers. There is a massive transformation taking place in the way we manage ourselves for the general administration as well. We have moved the company out from Technicolor so we need to build our departments in terms of finance, legal, HR and so on, which we are doing now.

 What areas of the business are priority right now for Grass Valley?

Our first priority is to have a strong service arm for the company. The service experience that customers get with Grass Valley is different from one place to another. In some areas, we act as systems integrators; in some other areas, we only sell our products. We are going to harmonise and industrialise our service capability on a global basis.

The first priority, therefore, is to offer greater customer support anywhere in the world and this requires a lot of work. We recently hired a new head of services from HP as part of these efforts.

The next step would be to offer our professional services to customers as consultants or developers of their solutions. We do not necessarily have to build anything for the customer but we could help them with the transformation of their business model from traditional solutions to a more file-based architecture where there are a lot of workflows.

Customer support is a complete architecture internally, which means we have to look at the way we set up our call centres, the tools our people are using, the way our products are designed and the service factor. It’s really a holistic chain that we are reviewing right now.

We are also going to put more and more emphasis on software. This year, at NAB, for instance, we announced a very important product called STRATUS.

We need to help customers bridge the gap while they are assembling their workflows. We need to give them a kind of a backbone for them to manage their file-based operations. This is also a priority behind services and over time, we will have more and more software engineers.

Beyond that, we intend to continue to be a very strong player in cameras, switchers, routers and so on.

We also intend to look more at vertical markets although we can’t disclose anything further at this point.

As CEO, what are some of the challenges you see ahead of you?

Managing the speed of the transformation and maintaining the balance between the stability of what we have and the value of our existing business and relationship with the destination point and how quickly we can get there. Managing the speed and how many things you can do at a given time and once you believe you have done enough of transforming one sector, how to move on to tackling the next.

It is all about prioritising the issues at hand and working on them one by one.

In this chain, the first one is the company’s infrastructure so that is like the DNA, which we have been centralising in San Francisco and the second one is improving our service business. Once these two are done, we have more to address moving forward.

Have you given yourself a timeframe to undertake this transition?

We will reach profitability this year. It’s really a step-by-step process of getting the company to be a strong pioneer in the transformation and improvement of the broadcast industry.

Do you think the tsunami that hit Japan will impact the broadcast industry?

I hope there will be none. I hope our Japanese competitors and our own operations in Japan catch up. Japan has always had a promising future as the largest provider of products and solutions for this market.

In Japan, we have a good business and have more than 100 engineers developing products for us.

For us, it’s a very important market. With regards to any product disruption based on whatever may happen, things are in a bit of flux right now. I think everyone in the technology industry as a whole is trying to understand the implications of the disaster and which components are going to be short or not. So far, we have not had any short supply. We do not know what will happen in the next few months. Whenever we have evidence that we really have need for allocations of products given the lack of some critical components, we will inform the market about it.

Will there be an impact? Probably, but we do not know enough to make decisions at this point.