I sit down and talk with Eric Bassier of Quantum to talk about their new solutions, including updates to StorNext, and NVME storage solutions. and ActiveScale object store system for indexing and archiving footage. This is part of the Virtual Conference Coverage 2020

Me Why don’t you tell everybody A little bit about you? And of course, a little bit about Quantum.

Eric Bassier I am Product Marketing Manager here at Quantum, a data storage company really focused on video and other forms of unstructured data. And of course, we’ve had a long presence and participation in the media and entertainment industry.

Me What were you guys going to talk about at NAB?

Eric Bassier Well, yeah, it’s a bummer not to be down in Las Vegas this year. The NAB Show for us is always a great opportunity to meet with all of our top customers. You know, we typically have hundreds of meetings there every week. And it’s always a good opportunity for us to unveil our latest innovations. This year, because NAB didn’t take place in Las Vegas, we actually decided to host our own virtual live NAB event and it’s actually taking place this week.

We’re unveiling new innovations that we’ve brought to market across our entire product set and that really deals with end-to-end workflows, everything from very high-speed tier one production storage to massively scalable online archives and everything in between.

In addition to talking about some of the new products that we’re coming out with, we’re talking about some of the things that are top of mind in the industry. First and foremost is how to maintain business continuity in the age of COVID. And really, that means in media how to enable a remote workforce, how to enable remote online editing, remote production, so we’re talking about that.

And last, but not least, enabling hybrid cloud and multi-cloud workflows. I think more than anything in this pandemic, once our customers got through crisis mode, it’s really been an accelerant toward a more hybrid cloud and multi-cloud future, an accelerant of where I think we and the media industry were going over the next number of years and it’s forced a lot of us to get there quicker.

Me Yeah, absolutely. I’ve seen a lot of companies put out products that they weren’t planning to put out for a couple weeks or months. And they wanted to get it out in your hands. I know a few people that were planning to put together new shows and new events that just decided to push it into the virtual space. And they’re having some good success by doing this last minute thing, although it’s very jarring for sure.

Eric Bassier We’ve been really pleased with the success we’ve had so far. As I said, one of the most important things for us with NAB is meeting with all of our customers in this space. For us, culturally, it’s  where we get most of our ideas for our next-generation products. We really look forward to working hand in hand with our customers to help them solve their biggest and their emerging business challenges. And we’ve been able to do that now virtually and just try to replicate that experience as best as we can.

Me Let’s talk a little bit about this press release. The biggest thing that you’re going to be talking about is your StorNext software, correct?

Eric Bassier Yeah. And as you said, a lot of companies have had to quickly pivot their roadmaps and maybe redirect priorities, maybe change priorities. And we’ve done that with our StorNext software. You know,