At Avid’s third annual Avid Connect event, over 1,000 people gathered prior to the official opening of NAB 2016 to hear the company’s chief executive Louis Hernandez Jr. “We’re the most open, extensible company here,” claimed Hernandez. “We invite everyone to join the open movement. We can solve this connectivity problem once and for all.” Proof of this boast was the news that Avid and rival Adobe have collaborated to tightly integrate Adobe’s Premiere Pro editing toolset into Avid’s MediaCentral Platform.

Hernandez, who has been on a several-year course to turn Avid around, recounted that when he first began travelling globally to hear customer complaints, one told him that, “Avid isn’t just in a box, but it’s nailed the lid shut.” The clarion call for the last couple of years has been Hernandez’s acknowledgement that the company must open wide and integrate with third party players to survive — and help its customers survive.

That’s in an environment where media technology budgets have grown three to four percent, even as media consumption has grown 50 percent and the rate of media content creation has grown two- to four-fold.

“The industry is littered with siloed, disconnected products that haven’t changed,” said Hernandez. “[With Avid Everywhere, which has 66 pending patents], we took all the workflow and put it on a single platform, a journey to creating a global integrated network with common services.” Hernandez described current use cases around the globe including the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, and stressed the important of the Customer Association, which has 5,500 members.

Chief product officer Dana Ruzicka made three product announcements, including the integration of Avid and Adobe into Avid MediaCentral. “We’ve developed an extension to use Avid MediaCentral/UX within Premiere. So you have access to any assets that are available within Adobe Premiere.” Avid has additionally opened its platform up further to third party apps.

Also announced was Pro Tools cloud collaboration, which allows professional audio users to “connect, communicate and collaborate” over the Internet, with tools including Avid Artist Community and Avid Marketplace, to rent or buy apps and text/video chat with artists for specific audio files.

Finally, Avid introduced Avid NEXIS, a software-defined storage platform created specifically for media files. “Storage is antiquated, fragile,” said Hernandez. “How do you manage the explosion of data, ramp up capacity and deal with increasing costs? Avid NEXIS offers collaboration, dynamic virtualization and flexibility.”

Avid NEXIS lets users “mix and match storage engines and elastically scale capacity from as little as 20 TB to over 1.4 PB in a single system, without any interruption in service or down time.”

In the coming days at NAB, Avid also plans to talk about its work in video over IP, news workflows, security, and disaster recovery.