Avid, Microsoft Renew Partnership for Additional Five Years
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Avid has renewed its cloud collaboration with Microsoft. Over the course of the new five-year strategic alliance agreement, Avid will continue to develop and deploy its cloud-based solutions on Microsoft Azure. Since launching their initial collaboration, Avid and Microsoft have helped some of the world’s largest media companies to break new ground by moving their film and television content workflows into the cloud, which has enabled teams, including hundreds of editors, journalists, and other contributors to collaborate on movies, TV shows and other content on a global scale.
The renewed alliance continues the companies’ mutual commitments and investments in technology, product development, and go-to-market efforts globally. Together, Avid and Microsoft have already produced several essential media workflows running in the cloud, including collaborative editing, content archiving, active backup, and production continuity.
“Avid is very proud of its early strategic collaboration with Microsoft Azure, which has driven the era of cloud-based media creation beyond experimentation to today’s first large-scale commercial deployments with some of the most exciting media and entertainment brands,” said Jeff Rosica, CEO and President at Avid. “I’m very pleased that our shared accomplishments also prepared us to be ready to respond swiftly and keep Avid customers at work when the global health pandemic hit the industry overnight. Building on the lessons learned during this pandemic, the companies are well prepared for what we believe will be an accelerated pace of cloud adoption–entering a new phase of innovation to provide broadcasters, film studios and post houses of all sizes with more powerful technology solutions to enable flexible remote working, ensure better business continuity, and allow content creation teams to collaborate faster, more easily and on a much bigger global scale.”
Since the onset of the COVID-19 global health pandemic, Avid and Microsoft have also mobilized rapidly to aid numerous Avid clients urgently needing to transition their production personnel to working remotely from their homes in order to keep entertainment and news content pipelines flowing. Available solutions for remote working include the highly-scalable and secure Avid | Edit On Demand™ virtualized production environment, featuring Avid Media Composer video editing software and Avid NEXIS storage running on Azure.
“Avid | Edit on Demand, on Microsoft Azure, is the latest example of how cloud can be used to deliver industry workflows that are simple, flexible and scalable,” says Tad Brockway, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Azure Storage, Media and Edge. “We were pleased to help Avid bring this solution to market to help customers during the global health pandemic and look forward to working together to help this industry transform.”