The media and entertainment (M&E) industry has been completely disrupted over the last three years in ways never before experienced in the modern age. The result of which is an entirely new approach to working: a massive shift to remote work and seamless collaboration. This shift has accelerated adoption of distributed processes that enable virtual employees to connect across departments and time zones, maximizing flexibility and efficiency. At Dalet, we have been thinking about this for a long time. Once we saw this happening, we knew there was no going back and that we needed to quickly make sure all of our products featured cloud-native architecture to support our customers in this transition.
Time was of the essence for our customers and we had to accelerate to keep ahead of this rapidly evolving market
With the full financial backing from our historical investor, Long Path Partners, we announced our strategy to go private in 2020, freeing ourselves from the financial restrictions of being a public company. This decision made it possible to focus on the technological innovations needed to drive and transform our business. The newfound freedom accelerated the delivery of new technology that empowers our customers and positions Dalet as a leader in this new era.
We’re now ready to talk about what will be our biggest shift yet.
Ahead of the curve
For more than 30 years, Dalet ushered the M&E industry into the future by wholly embracing IT and combining broadcast with digital, changing the way we all produce and distribute content. Since then we’ve presided over every sweeping change in media technology that upended old paradigms overnight, which is why we’ve stayed not just relevant but at the forefront of change.
We pioneered digital production for radio broadcasters back in the 1990s. When media asset management became a thing in the early 2000s, we built one of the first platforms to enable it at scale. In the mid 2000s our technology and methodology underpinning story-centric news production introduced an entirely new way the industry thought about making news. Today, our content supply chain and workflow automation technology remains unmatched and powers some of the most advanced media operations in the world.
We keep an eye on the future, always. In doing so, we know exactly where we need to be for our customers, what we need to build versus what we need to buy to leapfrog innovation and be ahead of the curve. Anticipating market needs, Dalet acquired Brio in 2010, the technology at the cornerstone of today’s high-density ingest and playout workflows and tomorrow’s elastic, cloud-native ingest solutions. In 2014, the company acquired AmberFin, the standards-bearer for image quality in transcoding and media processing. Both are best-in-class technologies that enriched the Dalet ecosystem to power the most demanding media supply chains.
An experienced cloud company for a new era
As cloud came onto the scene, we immediately understood the benefits it would offer and made it a priority to build cloud technologies into our products. As in the past, we saw a tremendous opportunity to leapfrog innovation and build a production and distribution ecosystem for content creators that would transform the way major media companies work in the cloud. In 2019, Dalet acquired the Ooyala Flex business, a company of exceptional talent and technology that enabled us to realize our ambitions and bring to market the first cloud-native media supply chain and content management solution.
More recently, disruptions to media consumption habits and media supply chains have meant media organizations have adopted cloud technologies faster than they imagined. The systemic breakdowns of the COVID years has meant CTOs and managers have had to plug gaps using expensive, ad hoc fixes.
Coming out of the pandemic, scalable, sustainable, and robust solutions were needed to support the next phase of demand and production. The need for this technology is no longer an emergency fix; it’s an expectation, and it must be more efficient and more affordable. Before the chaos, we had the overall picture in our sights; now, we have a way for our customers to future-proof their businesses with cost effective, cloud-native solutions that will enable them to compete and succeed in this new world.
Neither assets nor people can be tethered to closed ecosystems any longer. Your content needs to be accessible and actionable where staff, partners and other stakeholders are, integrate seamlessly to their systems, and be turned around not in weeks or months while someone waits for technology provision and deployment but days, hours or less. Business agility and speed to market have become essential.
So we’ve spent the last two years expanding our leadership and customer teams to understand what our customers’ pain points are to the fullest and accelerating solutions to market to solve them. During that time, we rebuilt ourselves as a cloud-native, subscription-based media solutions company. Our leadership team has been strengthened with the appointment of Lincoln Spiteri as Chief Technology Officer, an expert in cloud architecture who designed the industry’s first cloud-native media supply chain solution, and Delphine Vantours as Chief People Officer, a recognized people-centric leader who excels at building world-class teams. Both bring decades of transformational achievements and industry-specific experience.
Now, under the stewardship of Dalet’s new CEO Carl Farrell, an accomplished executive who has successfully ushered several technology companies through transformative changes, we are prepared to continue our evolution, ensuring our customers are at the forefront with the most efficient, cost effective technology at their fingertips, and at their own pace.
A new platform approach
Hardware is software. Storage environments are sharing hubs. Production is distribution. Digital assets need to be edited, assembled, distributed and archived in the same platform and that platform needs to connect to every other environment that media companies, their distributed workforce and their partners use. Only a cloud-native approach provides the architecture required.
You no longer have to (or can afford to) concern yourself with numbers of servers, software formats or systems integration. The cloud simplifies and streamlines in the most cost and time efficient way and you can just spin it into being with a few mouse clicks. That kind of ease of use and nimbleness isn’t a luxury anymore, it’s critical to business success.
To solve the demands of this new world, we have adjusted the way we move our product set to a proven, single-technology stack solution available as SaaS, allowing customers to gradually transform their Dalet environments. This allows them to fully realize their return on investments. No big bang approach that forces a full product replacement and significant disruption. It’s a simple, elegant new model that provides more flexibility for all our customers.
Customers blazing the trail
Over 140 Dalet customers around the world have already found efficiencies in cloud environments managed by Dalet. These include media-rich organizations as varied as the BBC, the British Film Institute, Fox Sports Australia, the French Professional Football League (LFP), and STARZ, to name a few.
Many companies outside of M&E are realizing they are in fact media organizations too; new media companies are emerging every day from nearly every industry thanks to the global demand for video across all facets of life. Fitness companies like Peloton, corporate brands like American Family Insurance and dss+, as well as sports teams and leagues like the Australian National Rugby League, are all quickly evolving as content powerhouses that own their media supply chain from acquisition to distribution.
Key goals achieved and new goals to come.
2022 was a landmark year for Dalet, with Q4 marking its largest quarter in terms of customer and revenue growth. Dalet also passed a major milestone as a subscription-based company, with more than 50% of revenue now being recurring.
And we have even bigger goals for 2023 as we roll out new Dalet Pyramid modules into the market to expand our news solution offering. Ushering in a new line of transformative cloud-native solutions, Dalet is positioned to set new records for growth.
How will we do this?
We have expanded our cloud services teams and key systems integrator partnerships to better serve and support customers. Dalet has also expanded its sales touchpoint coverage to meet and connect with customers right in their own backyard. The company has established strong relationships with best-of-breed cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and OVH Cloud, amongst others, ensuring customers can use Dalet’s agile cloud-native and SaaS solutions with the provider of their choice. And we continue to keep our solutions open; today we have over 300 vendor integrations supporting customer workflows including leading production-oriented brands like Adobe.
Our commitment has been to the same objective we’ve always had, which is to usher our customers into the next phase of evolution with innovative technology that helps them succeed, without interruption. We have a fundamental collaboration framework with the best production and distribution tools for all content-rich organizations looking for better ways to tell their stories. Many of our customers have been with us for 10+ years, some 25! They have the confidence in us that we will listen, learn and deliver on the changing needs of the industry.
We have a long history of being ahead of the curve, and we’ve spent the most recent era of our history completely remaking ourselves to embrace the future… today.
We look forward to our next chapter with you!