INTERVIEW: Mr. Juan Carlos Ortolan, Sales Director CALA for SI-Media

In January, SI Media has opened a new office in Miami FL USA, with the aim to better support CALA Market and increase its presence in a region full of opportunities. About this we will speak with Mr. Juan Carlos Ortolan our Sales Director for CALA Region.

1) In which countries has SI Media decided to start working and increasing its presence in the last months?

We have a large territory at CALA, with a mix of languages and cultures. Our goal was to deep scan the region as much as possible by NAB. We went to Central America, Caribbean, then South America and Brazil to finish visiting Mexico before the NAB. Our goal was visiting current SI Media customers in the region as well as develop new opportunities. Parallel to that, we are building brand recognition and setting up a distribution network. Selling software requires good after sales support and we are willing to offer that from Italy, Miami and locally as well.

2) Which are SI Media ’s products that have been more successful in this period?

I’d say that the majority of the customer get really surprised about two things. Generally speaking, about SI Media solution as a really complete workflow solution. Today you may find some MAM, Automation, NRCS suppliers around, but just really few of them may offer such a comprehensive solution as SI Media does. Going to the specifics, most of the customers get impressed with our NRCS when they realize we are able to provide a complete Newsroom solution, MOS compliant. Now journalists can control ingest process either from baseband, watch folders, P2/XDCAM ingest, they can also editing their own clips by either simple mark-in mark-out or Proxy Editing or High-Res by integration with major NLE vendors. They may select the graphics and add the texts and pictures as well as they can Voice Over their own news, import wires, send news to the social media and finally get everything ready for the playout. At the time of News On-Air SI Media controls the A/B/C/D roll Video Server to run A/B roll as well as feed the studio screens, it runs the Character Generator and passes the text along to the Teleprompter.

3) How has been your experience in this area so far?

Very happy with the warm welcome that the market is offering to SI Media. This is a great signal moving forward. So far, just after two months of visiting customers, we are engaged in so many opportunities and we are already closing some of those deals. SI Media solution fits very well to CALA market expectations so we expect having busy time ahead. It will be a good opportunity to demonstrate that behind a good product we have a great team. It’s always good to do business, make new friends and enjoy life and CALA is a nice territory to enjoy culture diversity and people’s friendship.

4) And regarding next steps?

We want to stablish SI Media name in CALA and for doing that we need to prove we are committed to the region and for doing that we have decided to have a strong presence and we are already walking around finding opportunities to demonstrate that we have a great solution and we have a great team behind the product supporting customers. Beyond the current references in the region we are also offering Proof of Concepts in order to demonstrate our technology and to make customers acquainted and confidence with our solutions.

CALA is a huge territory and because of that we are working in building a strong and very committed business partner network for having success and keep customers happy.

We will participate in the major CALA events but most of the time we will be involved with customers developing projects and helping them to do the implementations.