Qligent, a specialist in enterprise-level, cloud-based content monitoring and analysis, has appointed Art Leisey and Lang Cooksey to newly created business development and sales engineering roles, effective immediately. Both positions report to John Shoemaker, Qligent’s Director of Sales.
The two positions were developed to address business growth in the broadband and broadcast markets, according to Shoemaker. Leisey will serve as Business Development Manager and focus on the North American broadband market, with an emphasis on cable, IPTV and OTT service providers. Cooksey will serve as Project Manager and Sales Engineer and assist Qligent customers in both verticals worldwide on all technical matters throughout the sales journey.
Leisey brings three decades of broadband industry experience and problem-solving innovation to his new role. As president and owner of CableCom Specialists, Leisey developed the first PC-based switching system which allowed Emergency Alert System integration into a complete Cable TV channel lineup. He later sold the technology to Trilithic, where he served as Director of Technology for nearly 15 years. This led to the formation of Trilithic’s EAS division, where Leisey successfully directed development of protocols and procedures for EAS systems throughout North America and Canada.
Leisey’s innovations at CableCom Specialists also include hardware and software tools to support early pay-per-view movie switching systems, with several deployments to Top 10 MSOs. He later held technical and regional sales management positions at Alltec Global and Mega Hertz, where he further developed long-term business relationships with leading cable and telecom service providers.
Leisey believes that Qligent’s technology will help solve the escalating quality of experience (QoE) that consumers face with broadband video delivery, particularly with OTT services. “The quality of experience is, at best, lacking within these services,” he said. “Consumers are quick to unsubscribe, or move on to another option, if the service is problematic. Qligent brings a problem-solving approach in collectingmetrics and data on signals from the source point to the end user, which will help our customers win the battle against churn. Importantly, Qligent’s Vision platform uses common-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware that quickly delivers an ROI for broadband service providers.”
Cooksey’s 15 years of broadcast and IT experience make him a perfect fit for his project management and sales engineering responsibilities at Qligent, where he will help customers initial system designs, field applications and post-deployment problem-solvingamong other tasks. Cooksey has held roles of increasing responsibility with some of the broadcast industry’s biggest names, including Harris Broadcast, Snell and Vizrt.
He joins Qligent from Telestream, where he spent five years as Enterprise Sales Engineer. At Telestream, he specialized in helping customers migrate from on-premise to cloud workflows — an opportunity he expects to see often at Qligent.
“The next logical step for many broadcasters is to migrate from on-premise to cloud-based workflows, and integrate more applications within existing IT infrastructure,” said Cooksey. “This is a model that Qligent has pioneered on the monitoring and analysis side of the business. As broadcasters deploy more OTT services and the number of media delivery platforms multiply, it’s important to transition these businesses to more efficient workflows that minimize hardware costs and requirements on the monitoring side, and apply the big data and analytics that can help them retain and grow viewing audiences.”
ABOUT Qligent
Qligent architects complete monitoring, visualization and delivery analytics solutions for broadcasters, content distributors, ad agencies, regulators and network operators. Based in Melbourne, Florida, Qligent’s software-defined approach provides an open, vendor-agnostic platform to monitor performance, integrity and compliance of multiple signals, streams and systems across enterprises of any size. Its solutions provide the same consistent quality of content and service across multiple delivery platforms simultaneously.
