Harris Academy

Harris Broadcast launched a training academy for the Middle East and South Asia region in Dubai last month while also formally introducing Alain Pecot, newly appointed Vice President of Harris Broadcast’s Middle East and Africa operations. BroadcastPro ME reports

Harris MESA Academy was launched last month in Dubai as an extension to the company’s existing Middle East and South Asia (MESA) regional headquarters in Dubai Media City, UAE. The academy offers specialist courses for engineers and operators to operate Harris technology with each course offering a full certification pack.

The Academy, which includes a completely integrated demo room and a fully equipped training centre, has been developed so that Harris Broadcast customers can experience and receive hands-on training on the latest broadcast tools and technologies from the manufacturer.

With an end-to-end working system, the academy provides the venue for comprehensive product and solution presentations, as well as hosting training sessions for customers in the Middle East and beyond.

It is fully equipped to provide demonstrations of ingest all the way through to playout and transmission. It showcases the entire broadcast chain incorporating some of the company’s newer, more powerful and compact broadcast solutions, including the Harris Versio integrated playout solution, Selenio media convergence platform and HView SX Pro multiviewer.

Alain Pecot, newly appointed Vice President of Harris Broadcast’s Middle East and Africa operations, explains that the company’s presence in the region continues to grow with the establishment of the academy, which he calls a major investment for creating a venue for training, education and development.

In his new role at Harris, Pecot is based in Dubai but will travel extensively to oversee other territories under his remit. In addition to his team in Dubai, Pecot will also be supported by his colleagues in Paris for the French-speaking part of Africa.

“I am very happy to join a very talented team in the Dubai office. We don’t start from scratch as we already have existing operations which means we can focus more on the business,” says Pecot.

“The region is very promising, especially in terms of the market’s migration to digital. We are dealing with multi-platform delivery and not just linear, which makes it quite exciting. We are committed to the region, which is evident from the number and quality of projects that we are handling here.” he adds.

Pecot’s goals right now include, among other things, to understand some specifics of this region. A better understanding of the market in terms of its specific requirements will be his primary focus, he says.

“We’ll be working closely with our customers in the region to understand their requirements, suggestions and feedback. I intend to take these back ideas to the company and the designers to come up with optimum solutions for the region. We don’t just sell products; we also maintain them and train personnel to operate them, which is the idea for establishing the academy.”

Depending on the programme, the courses vary from one day to several days as each of the courses is

customised to individual needs. The trainers are Harris-qualified specialists who have been trained and certified by Harris.

“We bring the customer to the facility, both new and existing ones. Those who want to brush up their knowledge or get an introduction to newly introduced solutions are some of the potential candidates. We have provision to train freelancers as well. Once we are more settled, we will publish a schedule and those interested may enroll,” explains Pecot.

“We have ample resources here. Should we need additional trainers, we may call in people from other branches of Harris. We have a self-sufficient office that is fully equipped to handle projects of any scale.”

The demo facility also includes a range of signal processing applications including loudness management as well as the latest in routing systems and monitoring solutions, master control switching, and encoding and networking. Servers, editing, graphics and channel branding solutions as well as over-the-air DVB-T2 transmission are part of the chain right through to the set-top-box.

With broadcast systems increasingly moving to file-based infrastructures, a central part of the demonstration is dedicated to the Harris Selenio media convergence platform, which combines traditional baseband video and audio processing, compression and IP networking features — all in a single 3RU frame.

The facility includes a presentation of Harris sales and scheduling, traffic and billing, playout automation and asset management software solutions. This integrated, file-based workflow dramatically reduces the costs associated with content acquisition, production, distribution and media management.

There are similar facilities in the US and Europe which have proved to be very useful to educate the client as constant updating is crucial with more software-based solutions.

 

Who is …

 

Alain Pecot joined Harris Broadcast as Vice President of Middle East and Africa on July 2, 2013. Pecot was previously responsible for Harris’ Southern European operations, where he looked after the transmission business. In his new role, he will be responsible for the infrastructure, media software and transmission businesses of Harris Broadcast. Prior to joining Harris, Pecot worked with Thomson Video Networks and Integration Solutions business unit as Chief Marketing and Technology Officer. Pecot has also held senior positions at Grass Valley and Sony Broadcast & Professional Europe.