Grass Valley Director of Alliances Barb DeHart Discusses the GV Media Universe and the Future of AMPP

Grass Valley’s GV Media Universe is based around GV AMPP, the company’s scalable cloud platform designed for live broadcast operations. And now the company has hired industry veteran Barb DeHart, formerly of Telestream, as director of alliances, an important role to broaden the product portfolio for GV Media Universe clients and users.

Barbara DeHart has joined Grass Valley as director of alliances and is focused on bringing partners into the Grass Valley Media Universe.

“My role as the director of alliances for GVMU is really to develop a scalable strategy to extend the GVMU vision to many third-party developers and product providers,” says DeHart. “As much as it’s Grass Valley pieces that you’re looking at or interacting with AMPP we’re able to expand that story and bring other providers into GV Media Universe.”

At Telestream DeHart was VP of worldwide marketing and led the desktop software efforts in the Cloud Computing Business Unit so she has plenty of experience not only developing organic leads but also through a lot of acquisitions.

“One of the things that I was really proud of at Telestream is the competency that we developed around strategic partnering with many companies,” she says. “I think bringing that into how we build the Alliance ecosystem for GVMU is really important.”

DeHart says going from software into the cloud is so much different than going from hardware to software. With this paradigm shift, she says, everything about an organization really starts to change. That paradigm shift impacts how products are imagined, developed, released, and sold, according to DeHart. She adds that Grass Valley’s vision for the Media Universe is for live production that is either cloud native or cloud connected.

“The product progress that Grass Valley has been making with AMPP at the heart of the GV Media Universe, but also the overall vision, product execution, and the alignment across the entire organization,” she says.

The AMPP strategy is to become that kind of operating system layer that removes the complexity, or that solves some of those problems [around interoperability] ahead of time, says DeHart.

“That’s why having integrated partner strategies is so important, so that we’re working directly with the partners,” she says. “We’re not relying just simply on a standard for plug-and-play compatibility, we really are working out the problems and we’re creating in AMPP not just that plug and play capability, but also a really integrated user experience, integrated purchasing experience, and integrated deployment experience.”

DeHart says the word that Grass Valley uses more often than any when describing AMPP is frictionless.

“We want a frictionless user experience – truly frictionless,” she says. “How can these apps appear native to the user within the AMPP ecosystem? That’s why this partnering strategy isn’t just a light touch partner strategy. And in many of these cases we’re working very closely with the development teams in the partner companies to really develop that frictionless user experience.”

DeHart says the first partner has not been announced yet but that there is a lot of activity ongoing.

“We hope that by the end of May we’ll have our first big partner announcement,” she says. “And then many more in the pipeline behind that.”

Those interested in becoming a partner or learning more about it can contact Barbara via LinkedIn or email at [email protected].

“I just am so excited about what Grass Valley is doing,” she says. “It’s so much of what I’ve been hoping for in the industry. And then to see the product strategy solving some of those hard technical problems, and the alignment of the company around it, it’s a really exciting time.”