IBC2022: OpenDrives Bolsters Sales and Product Teams; Scales Latin America Presence

OpenDrives announced today several strategic senior hires to its sales and product divisions as it continues to accelerate innovation and market growth across verticals within media and entertainment, and enterprise IT.  These hires include: Sergio Soto (formerly Quantum) as director of Latin America sales and solution engineering, Rodney Williams (formerly DreamWorks Studios) as technical account manager, Vernon Leung (formerly Velasea) as director of product integrations and partnerships, Christopher Burgau (formerly Kyndryl) as regional territory manager, Jacqueline Gerhardt (formerly Unisys) as senior product manager, Colin Auxier (formerly SCCS, Inc.) as senior professional services engineer and Christopher Imes (formerly BeyondTrust) as senior systems engineer.

Today’s announcement comes amid a period of significant growth for OpenDrives as it executes on data storage solutions for the most demanding enterprise-scale workflows, from live editing to post production and backup and recovery. OpenDrives’ open and agnostic software-led approach to architecting solutions that match the individual performances needs of its customers, including Fox Sports, HBO, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Spotify, Epic Games, LA Kings, Vox and hundreds more, is reinforced by its best-in-class ecosystem of technology and channel partners, such as EVS, Western Digital, Signiant, Creative Mobile Solutions (CMSI), InterVision and CHESA.

“OpenDrives’ continued leadership momentum in providing flexible, scalable solutions for the entire data lifecycle I attribute to the excellence of our team–individuals who collectively share the same ethos that is cornerstone to our company: open-mindness,” said Sean Lee, chief strategy and operations officer at OpenDrives. “We’re thrilled to broaden our team expertise that spans continents, categories and verticals, alongside our ever-evolving open ecosystem of partners, to deliver on the data demands that are evolving just as fast across live broadcast, post production and enterprise IT.”

Earlier this year, OpenDrives debuted enterprise-scale software solutions, including a fully managed public cloud, S3 compatibility with public clouds such as AWS and Wasabi, inline caching, intelligent pre-fetching and data protection. These capabilities earned OpenDrives the 2022 NAB Show Product of the Year Award. Most recently, OpenDrives unveiled its container-native enterprise scale backup and recovery. A continued trajectory in leading innovations has helped OpenDrives achieve over 90% three-year YoY (year-over-year) revenue growth while doubling headcount in the same period.

OpenDrives is set to soon power Fox Sports’ live broadcast of Qatar 2022, which follows the success Fox Sports experienced using OpenDrives for NASCAR, the United States Football League reboot and many events in 2021 and 2022. OpenDrives delivered three times the throughput rate compared to Fox Sports’ previous workflows while cutting setup times setup time from days to hours.

“OpenDrives creates solutions that drive real-world business outcomes backed by a team that can uniquely intercept customer needs–something I’ve experienced the value of both as an end-user and as a competitor,” said Sergio Soto, director of Latin America sales and solution engineering at OpenDrives. “Right now, the Latin American market is dominated by players who rely on single-vendor ‘lock-in’ models–this has created a massive opportunity for OpenDrives to deliver vendor-agnostic solutions that are optimized to meet the unique needs of individual customers.”