This is the first in a series of employee interviews. Today’s interview is with Tony Picard, who joined videantis on June 1st, 2014 as VP Sales.

Why did you decide to join videantis?

Videantis provides an ideal combination of a strong market potential with key technology that addresses it. Cameras are growing explosively, both in consumer and automotive, at twice the rate of the semiconductor industry. The latest Amazon Firefly mobile phone has six cameras for instance, and the latest BMW X5 has five. In addition, there’s a clear market trend of combining computer vision with video coding. Whenever you have a camera, and you want to store or transmit these images, you need to compress the data, so you need codecs. Making all of these cameras smart is another trend, allowing new user experiences on our mobile phones, and making our cars 100% safe and more comfortable to drive.

I believe videantis is ideally positioned to become the dominant player in these automotive and consumer markets. They already have a proven track record, having signed up key customers, and very compelling low-power, high-performance and very small area numbers. There have been numerous tape outs, and the processor IP has already shipped in millions of devices in the field.

In addition, the IP is delivered as a full solution, including hardware, software, an ecosystem of partners and integration support. The core team has been working on this technology for over 15 years, so I was very excited to join this focused team in its current phase of strong expansion. It’s my natural habitat to help bring companies to their next phase of revenue growth. Growing a company’s business together with colleagues and customers is always a great experience and a personal favorite way to spend a large part of my time.

You’ve been with videantis for a month now. What does a typical day look like for you?

There’s no such thing as a typical day, that’s the fun part of this job. You need to be very flexible, diligent and creative. I’m mostly on the move, and when I’m not talking to our customers, I’m on Skype and email with my colleagues, communicating with the marketing, support, and technical teams. I just got back from my first overseas trip to the US with videantis, and I’m looking forward to meet our other customers all over the world, and continuing our success together. We make pretty long days, so it’s good that coffee in the US is measured in gallons, compared to the liters in Europe.

What do you see as the biggest opportunities for videantis and its customers?

The convergence of the mobile and automotive market space is very interesting to me. Our cars and mobile phones are both very centric to our lives. Cars take us to remote places and phones allow us to communicate with people that are remote. The mobile phone and automotive ecosystems are now starting to converge. There’s a unique role for videantis in that we address both these mobile and automotive markets, and the convergence of these markets opens up a lot of new opportunities.

Anything you’d like to say to our readers?

I’d like to tell them that they’re always welcome to reach out to me. We always seek a dialogue with our customers to ensure we understand their problems, development plans and roadmaps, and to discuss how we can together bring new functionality and great products to market. We always want to ensure that we provide substantial added value, which requires us to be close to our customers. Dear reader: feel free to call or email me any time.