Despite overseeing one of the fastest-growing companies in the technology-services industry (according to Inc. magazine), Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) President/CEO Bruce Lyon doesn’t see his company as a technology company per se. Instead, the company has attempted to remain agnostic on technology, working alongside other industry powers — EMC, NetApp, Quantum, Levels Beyond — to serve as more of a broadcasting consultant. You may notice a pattern there: storage companies.
IMT President/CEO Bruce Lyon at the company’s meeting space at the Renaissance Hotel
SVG sat down with Lyon outside IMT’s meeting space in the Renaissance Hotel to discuss the storage explosion he sees on the horizon.
IMT has focused its efforts on partnering with companies in the asset-management and archival space. What’s the strategy behind that?
My view is, the media business is the storage business. What I know about our customers is, they don’t throw anything away. So our job really is to architect, design, build, procure, and install these complex asset-management systems, tiered-storage systems, hierarchical storage systems. But it’s all about being able to ingest something, access it, secure it, manage it, deliver it wherever it needs to be, and — probably more than anybody’s thinking about — analyze it.
If there is one trend that is interesting to me, it’s how data analytics is going to impact the media business. There is a partner, Levels Beyond, and I think they have an environment that allows one to plug in some analytics that wasn’t there before.
What are you personally doing this week? Are you going out into the exhibit halls? Are you having clients come here to visit you?
I do a combination of things. I am supporting the sales and engineering team; sometimes, they need a little bit of gray hair, and I can provide that. I think it’s always important to be able to engage directly with our customer base. Many of them are here at the show, and I want to be able to let them know that, from the top down, their business is something that we don’t take for granted. There’s the diplomacy thing.
Do you have your eye on any particular technology?
There are some technology areas that I am interested in. [Besides] the data analytics, I’m really interested in drones. I think that, especially for the media and entertainment space, drones represent a whole new point of view in coverage of an event or in motion pictures or television.
When you meet with sports clients, what are some of their common pain points?
There’s something I found rather shocking: in five or six years, we’re projecting going from 15 exabytes to 51 exabytes [in storage] just in media and entertainment.
Is that because more content is being created? Is it larger file sizes with 4K?
Yes, I think it’s a combination of those things, but I would say, more and more, I think that everyone is becoming a videographer. There’s this explosion of digital photography and what’s fascinating, at least in our industry, is that nobody throws anything away.
