TORONTO – “The Cloud is the future,” MediaValet CEO David MacLaren told CDN after accepting the award for Solution Provider of the Year at the 14th annual CDN Channel Elite Awards (CEA).
MediaValet made history at the 2016 CEAs by becoming the first born-in-the-cloud solution provider to take home the grand prize. The digital asset management (DAM) company helps companies manage all their brand assets and marketing materials. The company has many noted customers such as the New England Patriots of the NFL, the US Naval Institute, Brand USA, and the Canadian Blood Services. MacLaren says the company is just getting started and is in a position to compete as a cloud-based digital asset management company.
MacLaren comes from humble beginnings at VRX Studios Inc., a provider of photography and content services to the global hospitality and travel industries. With 15,000 hotel customers in 122 countries around the world, VRX Studios handled 40 terabytes of primarily photos and video.
However, VRX Studios struggled to find a software solution that met their needs to manage, secure, and protect those assets. That’s when they turned to the cloud and found what they were looking for in Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. In 2011, MacLaren began working on the software necessary to help manage and distribute those assets, while also making them accessible to their customers around the world.
As one of the first applications built purely on Microsoft Azure, VRX Studios found the solution they needed, and continued to use the solution over the next three years to continue to provide for their customers around the world. That is, until word got out about the success VRX Studios was having with their new built-in-the-cloud solution.
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In 2014, MacLaren decided to sell VRX Studios, spin out the software and IP, and with just eight people, he founded MediaValet. Two years later, the company has 43 members in Vancouver and another 20 offshore.
“We sit on 34 data centers around the world, and aim to meet the digital asset needs of any company no matter where it is in the world. Whether it is 10 terabytes, or 1,000+ terabytes, 10 users or 10,000 users, or 100,000 users, because we built on the cloud from scratch we are able to use the latest technology to be able to meet the scalability, security, and redundancy needs of any organization,” MacLaren said.
Since MediaValet is built directly on a large cloud platform like Microsoft Azure, MacLaren insists that the level of security is already at a higher level of security than any on-premise solution. “We’ve got a tremendous relationship with Microsoft. They help us in many ways, and are a great technology and channel partner,” added MacLaren.
Moving forward, MacLaren and MediaValet look to grow as a channel partner. “We’re really excited to win the Solutions Provider of the Year Award. We just started our channel program, so its very new to us and we are learning a lot, and it is a tremendous amount of opportunity for channel in the future. This is one of our first steps and we’re looking forward for many to come in the future.”