Avid's Krall Touts Hardware Acceleration
At the annual NAB convention earlier this month, David Krall, President and CEO of Avid Technology sat down for an exclusive chat with DMN's Charlie White. In his candid remarks, Krall explains what makes Avid's DNA product line unique, talks about the scramble to teach Avid's sales and support staff about the new top-secret systems in record time, and points out compelling reasons for using his new acceleration hardware when dealing with the large amounts of 10-bit data that are becoming commonplace in the world of digital video editing and compositing.DMN: These must be the biggest announcements from Avid in a few years.
Krall: From the people who have been with Avid from the very beginning, they tell me this is our biggest NAB ever -- the biggest set of product announcements all at one time.
DMN: A lot of people are saying it's great that you're supporting previous Avid formats.
Krall: Yes, we made it a big goal for the new Media Composer Adrenaline product to be the most compatible Media Composer that we've ever built. So not only do we support all of our Meridien media, we also support our ABVB media and AVR resolutions as well.
DMN: This was a huge project. How long was it in development? How much did you spend on it?
Krall: We spent three years in development, and about $50 million of R&D directly on these products, while at the same time we were continuing to do forward development on our current line of products, because obviously the market's not going to wait for innovation, so that's why Avid has, in the past several years, been spending over 20% of our revenue on R&D.
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DMN: Now, the engineers were keeping this a secret from everyone else while this was being developed. Is there a problem educating your sales staff and your PR people about this complex group of products all of a sudden? Are they having trouble getting the word out, do you think?
Krall: A great question. We've made a very significant effort to do sales training this week, and our product marketing team has actually done a great job preparing the materials, doing all the training, and then making sure that we can just communicate a very clear message. What I find is that the more powerful the product is, the simpler the message is to communicate, because you can just touch on the high level performance of it, the quality of the product, the compatibility of the product, the price/performance of the product. From the sales guide point of view, a thousand features are not as important as if you can let me have these three things that are so compelling that the rest of it, you can sit down and go through a demo and see it all. So from a sales training point of view, we just have such compelling highlights for the product, essentially, we believe it's going to be easy to sell.
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