Christophe Carniel

Christophe Carniel, CEO of NETIA shares details of the company’s success and its plans for the MENA region with BroadcastPro MEHow successful have you been in the Middle East and North African market?

We achieved almost 20% of our revenues from the Middle East and North Africa area in 2010.

In which areas have you been most successful? Would you be able to mention any specific projects?

Our greatest successes are primarily on the radio side, with our main customers being public or national broadcasters. NETIA has about 20 to 30% marketshare in this area in the MENA region.

We have done recent installations in Algerian Radio, Shems FM, Tunisian Radio, Egyptian (ERTU) radio, the Ministry of Culture and Information in Saudi Arabia, National Oman Radio,

and in Ethiopia to name a few. We will soon be deploying some more content management solutions with new customers in MENA.

You have been a major player in the North African belt. Will the political turmoil affect your business?

The political situation right now in MENA is making business a bit tricky as most projects were accepted by the end of 2010 and now may be delayed.

Do you have any special plans to fortify your position in the Middle East? Will you consider opening an office here or adding more sales staff to look after this region?

We currently do not have any plans to open offices in the MENA area as we are developing long-term partnerships with local dealers and system integrators. Our local partners include First Gulf, Bawan IT, Thales, Salam Mediacast, Jamal Jaroudi Group, BFE, Heat in Jordan as well as AVTM in Morocco.

Also, NETIA became part of GlobeCast almost three years ago and our solutions are now being distributed by the GlobeCast office in Beirut. It is actively developing business in this part of the world to provide its existing clients with a complete solution, including NETIA products, that covers all aspects of content management from ingest to delivery through the GlobeCast satellite and fibre network. This is on an international level. We are very committed to investing in training them on our products and solutions and they, in turn, have great knowledge of their markets and are close in proximity to customer sites.

What are some of the challenges of working in the Middle East and how have you addressed them?

The challenge for NETIA in the Middle East is to find the right local distributors, who are able to sell our new NETIA CMS Content Management Solution and broaden their NETIA portfolio, in order to serve TV or media groups.

CABSAT provides a big opportunity. Our participation at CABSAT is very important and plays a great role in maintaining our presence, meeting with our customers, and demonstrating our new solutions.

Our sales strategy in this region relies on strong and established relationships between our sales team, our local dealers and our existing clients. Our reputation in MENA is solid and we have often won contracts based on referrals and word of mouth.

Are there any unique elements you try to incorporate into your solutions specifically for this market?

One of our unique selling points or differentiators in MENA is our offering of the UNICODE standard, meaning that we can adapt the GUI of our software to any language or dialect. We have also adapted our user manual into Arabic.

As a content management specialist, what do you see are some of the upcoming trends in the market and how are you looking to address them?

We have noticed a convergence in the need to access, repurpose and share archives easily between radio and TV broadcasters in the Middle East. For patrimonial/historical archives, we have been contracted to develop systems that allow historical national radio archives to be merged with video archives and other video content for television broadcast. So this convergence sets the pace and will accelerate growth and development of our CMS solution for managing their archived content.