Avid today announced that its Board of Directors appointed Louis Hernandez as president and chief executive officer, effective today. He succeeds former president and chief executive officer Gary Greenfield, who will remain on Avid’s Board of Directors. Let’s take a brief look at the past and the future.
The press release
Louis Hernandez has been a member of the Avid Board since 2008. Most recently, he was also Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Open Solutions, Inc., a technology provider to financial institutions worldwide, which was acquired in January 2013 by Fiserv, Inc.
According to the Avid press release:
“Louis is a visionary, inspirational leader with a stellar track record of driving the operations and growth of technology companies in a variety of industries,” said George Billings, speaking on behalf of Avid’s Board. “As lead director, he spent years developing a deep familiarity with Avid’s customers, markets, and products that will allow him to quickly make a positive impact as chief executive.”
“It is an exciting opportunity to lead Avid at this very important juncture in the company’s history,” said Mr. Hernandez. “As the industry leader for more than 25 years, Avid continues
to set the standard for non-linear-editing, media management, and collaboration in the audio, video, and broadcast markets. The company is well positioned for growth and global expansion in this fast-moving marketplace. It is exciting to be working with the Avid team, as we drive results and value for our customers, employees, and shareholders.”Mr. Hernandez added, “On behalf of the Avid community, I want to thank Gary Greenfield for his outstanding leadership and lasting contributions to Avid and our industry.”
A brief history lesson
I don’t know previous CEO Gary Greenfield personally. Oddly enough I have never even spoken to him. But I do know a little about his background. As opposed to Dave Lebolt, former head honcho of Digidesign (which was purchased by Avid), Gary doesn’t come from a music background. Prior to joining Avid in December 2007, he was CEO of GXS, Inc. He has also served as CEO of Peregrine Systems, Inc., president and CEO of MERANT and CEO of INTERSOLV, which merged with Micro Focus to form MERANT.
According to Google Finance, this is what has happened to Avid since December 2007.
Thinking about what has happened since 2007, here are a few major things that comes to mind (in no particular order).
1. The Digidesign brand was phased out and became Avid Audio.
2. Avid acquired Euphonix, a brilliant move in my opinion that shattered the trinity of Apple, Apogee and Euphonix.
3. Pro Tools got untied from its hardware, something that I think made just about everyone happy. This happened with the release of Pro Tools 9. What didn’t make people very happy was the ridiculous software upgrade costs to Pro Tools HD 10.
4. Pro Tools HD Native was released.
5. Pro Tools HDX was released, the long awaited followup to Pro Tools HD.
6. AAX, the future of Pro Tools plugins, was unveiled. This happened with the announcement of Pro Tools 10.
7. Many, many jobs have been cut. It seems to be a tradition for Avid to cut hundreds of jobs yearly, typically announcing it as a “restructure” or as “streamlining”.
8. Avid sells M-Audio to inMusic.
Things have of course been happening on the video side as well but that’s outside of the scope of this post.
The future?
What the future holds is of course anyone’s guess. There have already been a few changes recently (head of sales and head of marketing) so I’m not sure we’ll see much else happen… But then again, new guy, new tweaks, perhaps?
What do you want to see happen?
I would love to see 2 versions of protools. 1 for music and the one that exists now which focuses on mixing and post. Would be cool to be able to write music in an inspiring environment and then open it in protools to mix. Maybe its not the correct answer. The main concern is that protools is losing the home musician. It’s a mixing editing tool and one of the best. The industry is just so different now that we need to be able to be inspired to create, not just edit and mix.
I jumped ship after the outrageous upgrade to 10. I use studio one and its just so much more inspiring. I do miss the cleanliness of protools editing though.
Anyways I hope they keep doing well because I have some stocks I’d really like to sell
Personally, I don’t mind if they lose the home musician. Don’t forget that the name of the product implies professional use. Yes, it’s nice to have a simple version of Pro Tools for home users, but they can’t win against GarageBand. The last few years have felt like they’ve made major compromises for professional users in a largely wasted effort to chase the home user. If they lose their professional base they may have nothing left.
So the rumours that Gary Greenfield was swapping jobs with Joseph Ratzinger weren’t true?
+1 Scott McDowell’s comment.
we(I) paid over 10K for HDX upgrade (before 13K hd3) and how much money we(I) lost loosing all TDM plug-ins and RTAS is next
most expensive software package ever created!!!
I think we are worthy to get PT11 ONE software & hardware package to compose, mix and master. not jumping like F******* monkeys between different softwares
WF is going on with AVID and how much upgrade will cost ….. again!!!!!!!
new young generation is coming working in reaper, logic, cubase, studio one, etc. They not care about high quality. All most all music downloads are in mp3
Welcome to future!
@scottmcdowell What compromises would they be exactly?
I don’t think Avid could survive, if they just served the Pro market, because this market is shrinking, and continues to shrink. Reason for that are the home-recording solutions mentioned above (Garageband, Reason, etc).
They somehow have to appeal to the so-called Prosumers, which have more money to spend, and keep their pricing right.
Why did nobody realize that the european pro market is dead?
They realised that the only cashcow that performed really good was PT bundled with a cheap audio interface. Cheap stuff for the mass market.
They sold the rest, as you know and so streamlined everything.
What I don’t understand is, why they don’t include EuCon in their controllers.
That would rise the sales
[...] vom ProToolerBlog.com hat Gary Greenfield’s Leistungen börsentechnisch zusammengefasst und liefert ein interessantes [...]