Avid has opened the Avid Centre of Excellence (ACE) within its head office at Pinewood Studios, London. ACE has been built to support demand from customers for a central European location where they can receive training, access the full range of Avid products, and view solutions in real working environments.
ACE took 12 months to plan and build at a cost approaching £1.5 million. Avid partnered with other manufacturers including Think Logical, who supplied a fibre-based routing system for video, audio and user interfaces, and Panasonic, who provided seven 65-inch plasma screens. Other key suppliers were Absolute CAD, who installed and configured over 27km of cable, and Evertz, who supplied multiview display technology and HD SDI router equipment.
Paul Hennessy, vice-president of sales for EMEA, said: “It’s a great investment for us. We’ve really thought about the best way for our customers to receive the highest level of training and support as well as how to showcase our full range of products to our customers in workable environments that they’re familiar with. We feel that ACE really fulfils this need.”
To coincide with the opening of ACE, Avid has made a series of new hires and promotions. Simon Sherbourne has been appointed as audio application specialist. Based in Pinewood, Simon will be responsible for building and maintaining relationships with Avid’s professional audio clients. Simon has over 14 years’ experience in the industry, having worked previously as technical support at Digidesign and as a Pro Tools/ICON trainer for the BBC, Granada and Talkback Thames. Most recently, Simon worked as a mixer re-versioning foreign language films for Disney/Pixar.
Mathias Hekton has been appointed as an application specialist and will be based out of Avid’s Stockholm office, while Tom Crocker has been also promoted to application specialist for video products across Northern Europe.
Paul Hennessy added: “I’m pleased to welcome Simon, Mathias and Tom to the team. Between them they have a wealth of industry experience which will prove to be invaluable to Avid.”
