By Santiago Solanas, CEO, Dalet
It's been approximately six months since I joined Dalet as CEO. This transformative journey has allowed me to spend many hours understanding the needs of our clients, partners, and colleagues, providing me with invaluable insights into the state of our industry.
The recent IBC2024 Show, along with the associated side events and conferences, reinforced the key themes I've been observing over the past months, which have to do with the financial and operational challenges that many media and technology companies are currently facing.
After engaging with our clients and gathering insights from industry analysts during the show, I identified two recurring themes in our discussions: value and interoperability. These are critical challenges that must be addressed as our industry stands at a significant crossroads.
Never Mind Features, Users Want Value
A predominant challenge within media technology is the difficulty buyers face in identifying true value among the myriad of solutions offered. At the show, I observed the pervasive sentiment that market offerings frequently fail to meet expectations. During the Devoncroft Executive Summit in Amsterdam, I heard several media companies speak of technology investments that sit unused - up to 50% in one particular case! These idle assets take up valuable real estate, waste resources, and incur significant costs.
The root of this issue lies in complex pricing structures and feature sets that are often overcrowded, not delivering tangible benefits for users. Technology vendors must shift their focus from purely financial goals to truly enhancing user experiences, prioritizing the delivery of genuine value through their products.
At Dalet, we’ve embraced a mission focused on delivering solutions that help our clients increase revenue, achieve cost savings and obtain greater ROI — a priority we have held for some time now. Our commitment is not only to deliver useful functionality, but also to focus sharply on customer success through operational efficiencies and authentic enhancements to the user experience.
Dalet’s continued pursuit of value is best illustrated by our recent collaboration with PPC, where we successfully delivered measurable benefits. The global production company uses Dalet's solutions to standardize their production-based workflows and integrate key technologies within their business to achieve greater efficiencies and tangible cost savings. In addition to PPC, we have a rich history of delivering tangible value to our clients through the implementation of Dalet's solutions. Consider Cricket Australia, where our workflow integration platform, Dalet Flex, was instrumental in eliminating technical debt and operational inefficiencies, bringing considerable time and resource savings compared to their previous archive workflow. A couple of years ago, we delivered a Dalet Flex solution to premium Korean content platform, Kocowa, which, as they described, “provided a highly configurable API and technical environment for us to meet our media flow requirements, helping us reduce considerable costs and speed time to market.”
As evident over the years, prioritizing value over features has been integral to Dalet's DNA. I believe that in today's efficiency-conscious industry landscape, only those solution providers who can demonstrate the true value of their offerings will endure - especially for mission-critical workflows.
Interoperability - The Key to Technical Success
The second significant theme I've noticed in recent months is the crucial need for interoperability. Media companies pride themselves in curating their technology solutions and working with best-of-breed providers, but have struggled for years to make them all "play nicely together," i.e. to interoperate and integrate diverse systems into smooth, cohesive workflows.
The reality of siloed systems and proprietary formats often leads to inefficiencies and unnecessary hurdles for media professionals. We all know that this can lead to delays in content delivery, impacting revenue streams and business success.
The IABM underscored this point at their IBC2024 State of the Industry breakfast - interoperability is not just a technical requirement, but the backbone of successful collaboration and future-proofing in the media tech ecosystem. This insight reinforces Dalet’s focus on ensuring our solutions not only work seamlessly within our own ecosystem, but also integrate effortlessly with other platforms and technologies. Our goal is to ensure that our customers derive maximum value from Dalet's solutions by integrating them with both new and existing technology, thereby protecting their investments and increasing global ROI.
Dalet Flex exemplifies our commitment to developing a premier integration layer for the industry. Since its inception, Flex has pioneered seamless connectivity between third-party platforms, ensuring operations run efficiently and collaboration is enhanced. Through careful listening and understanding of our clients’ needs, Dalet Flex was developed to be adaptive, intuitive, and a key enabler of operational success since day one, featuring more than 300 integrations to date.
We also recognize that technology buyers seek simplicity from their vendors, so at Dalet, we continue to evaluate and are working to significantly enhance the customer journey and experience. By focusing on reducing complexities, our solutions allow enterprises to harness the true potential of their media assets, unburdened by clunky integration issues. Some of our latest partnerships include Veritone, Singular.live and Telstra.
Dalet's Commitment to Empowering Your Businesses
After more than 180 days as Dalet’s CEO, I am convinced that true value and outstanding interoperability are vital for success in the industry. These are not just our business objectives, but core principles that steer our development efforts.
As 2025 approaches, a year predicted to be pivotal to the industry, Dalet’s mission remains to be an enabler of storytelling and business success through technology that helps create value and is simple to use.
Helping our clients maximize their investment is what drives us every day. Whether you're already a valued client or contemplating joining us, I'll be happy to hear from you about how we can help address these industry-wide issues and navigate the evolving media technology landscape together.
