Rick Clarkson Returns to Signiant as Chief Strategy Officer

Signiant announced the return of Rick Clarkson, the company’s former Vice President of Product Management and a key player in the genesis of Media Shuttle and Signiant’s transition to SaaS. Clarkson will fill the newly created position of Chief Strategy Officer to steer the roadmap for new services that leverage Signiant’s SaaS platform and huge global footprint in the Media & Entertainment space.

Clarkson first joined Signiant in 2007 as a member of the product management team. Elevated to VP in 2011, his vision of using cloud technology to build a powerfully simple file transfer solution led to the category-defining Media Shuttle product, Signiant’s first SaaS offering. Media Shuttle is now the de facto standard for person-initiated file transfers with more than 300,000 users worldwide, from 25,000+ companies in over 200 countries.

“When we first discussed the idea of Media Shuttle with customers, many M&E executives told us point blank that they would never consider SaaS, “ says Clarkson. “Six years later, the industry has evolved to a point where SaaS is fully accepted, cloud-native design is widely understood, and Signiant is the established market leader.”

“We’re delighted to welcome Rick back to the Signiant team,” says Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant. “The company has huge momentum right now. With our software playing an increasingly pivotal role in the media industry’s technical infrastructure, customer interest in collaborating with Signiant to solve mission-critical problems has never been higher. Rick is the ideal person to serve as our focal point for this engagement and to connect the dots between emerging technologies, market dynamics, and internal innovations. His understanding of our technology and creative energy make Rick uniquely suited to navigate through this phase of high growth and increasingly strategic customer relationships.”

Clarkson adds, “With the media industry going through a phase of rapid transformation, many elements of legacy infrastructure are ripe for SaaS disruption. Signiant transport is now mission-critical in every part of the media supply chain as changing media consumption patterns drive an explosion of content, device proliferation, bigger files, and cloud adoption. Our ubiquitous SaaS platform not only provides the transport underpinnings, but also delivers intelligent metadata-enabled services facilitated by its multi-tenant, cloud-native architecture. I’m excited to join the team to accelerate the launch of new value-add services to meet the complex and ever-changing needs of modern media operations.”