Qligent Secures A New VP of Sales
Qligent, the provider of cloud-based media delivery quality assurance products, has appointed a 30-year broadcast industry veteran to serve as its Vice President of Sales.
Reporting to CEO Brick Eksten, Ken Dillard will lead all sales and business development initiatives in North American and the CALA region, and collaborate with Qligent sales representatives and partners worldwide.
Dillard brings a diverse range of broadcast experience industry to his new role. He spent nearly 15 years as a broadcast engineer for radio and television stations before transitioning to sales. He has since held roles of increasing responsibility with Harris Corporation, Dejero, Avid and TVU Networks, working his way up from regional to executive-level positions. His vast sales and engineering experience gives him strong knowledge and expertise across the entire media production and delivery workflow, including Qligent’s core monitoring and analysis business.
Dillard joins Qligent at a time of broadening horizons for the company. While Qligent remains an active force in the traditional broadcast space, the company continues to evolve its vision for emerging opportunities and a broader customer base of content providers. For example, Qligent’s core QoS, QoE and compliance monitoring strengths have been applied to event-based monitoring with Dymos, a SaaS-based cloud solution ideal for event-driven OTT originators and DTC content providers. Qligent has also put a stronger emphasis on data-driven analysis to help all customers better understand and service viewing audiences.
“Broadcast is an important staple of our business, and we see strong opportunities to help broadcasters leverage a very rich and granular level of data to monetize their OTA and OTT services,” said Dillard. “We are also working very closely with content creators and their distribution partners to bring core Qligent competencies in QoS/QoE monitoring to their services.”
Dillard is especially bullish on Dymos, which allows Qligent customer to spin up event-based streams and temporary channels in the cloud for sports, live events and special broadcasts, among other creative programming requirements. “The ability to offer our customers a way to spin up, monitor and spin down these channels on a consumption-based cost structure without an investment in on-premise equipment opens an entirely new wealth of programming and revenue-generating opportunities for broadcasters and content providers,” he said.
Dillard also sees opportunity to extend Qligent’s reach beyond the media and entertainment landscape, noting that Qligent’s Foresight solution can provide valuable data analytics for corporate AV, digital signage and other audience-driven video services.
“Ken joins Qligent at a time of growth and expansion into new and exciting business areas for the company,” said Eksten. “He brings a detailed understanding of how media enterprises are accelerating toward DTC business models, which represents the direction of where the broader media and entertainment industry is headed. These skillsets, along with his strong track record of successful sales and business development initiatives for leading industry vendors, makes him an ideal fit for helping Qligent customers monetize their content and improve client satisfaction.”
