There is one truth that holds everywhere I work — whether I am sitting across the table from a broadcaster in Germany, a media group in Singapore, or a network operator in the Middle East. Business is done between people. And the more trust exists between those people, the better the solution we can build together.
That sounds straightforward. It is not. Trust across cultures, time zones, and markets is earned slowly and lost quickly.
No “one size fits all”
What I have learned in this role is that the fundamental human need is the same everywhere: people want their challenges taken seriously and their problems solved. But the way you earn the right to do that looks very different depending on where you are. Language, technical standards, the pace at which organizations adopt new technology, the regulatory environment — all of it shapes what a customer needs from a partner, and how your team must show up.
Our operating principle is “Think global, act local.” That means recognizing that there is no single solution that works everywhere and that customers adopt technology at their own speed and on their own terms. Our job is to find the right solution for their specific situation and not to sell what we believe should work in theory.
Global insight, local proof
One of the clearest examples of this approach in practice is how the SMPTE ST 2110 IP standard came to be. When the industry was working through the transition from SDI to IP infrastructure, it quickly became clear that a vendor-led, go-it-alone approach would not succeed. What sounds like a straightforward industry evolution was a major step, and it required customers and vendors to work through it together.
Here in Europe, standardization is critically important to how the industry moves. So rather than push a solution, we helped convene the conversation by bringing customers and vendors together under the AIMS initiative to define a standard that could scale, interoperate across the ecosystem, and be implemented reliably regardless of which vendor’s equipment was in the room. That joint ownership, anchored by a handful of key customers in Europe, is what gave 2110 its momentum and ultimately made it the global norm for IP media systems.
The result was something that could be documented, validated, and replicated. A defined installation and commissioning process. Interoperability between vendors as a given, not an afterthought. And critically, a migration path that customers around the world could follow — not a proprietary approach that locked them in.
What we proved collaboratively in one market became the foundation for IP migrations worldwide. That is what bringing global experience to bear on a local challenge looks like — and it is why those longer-term customer relationships matter so much. You cannot build that kind of industry-shaping work on a transactional relationship.
What keeps customers up at night
The pressures our customers face vary by market and by organization, but they are converging around common themes. Public broadcasters operate under a different mandate than private networks. Regional channels face a different competitive reality than national ones. But almost universally, senior leaders are wrestling with the same fundamental question: how do we serve audiences across more platforms, protect advertising revenue, and compete effectively against global streaming providers who are now localizing their content?
That is not a technology question. It is a business model question. And answering it well requires a partner who understands the local operating environment — not just the product catalog.
Building the trust curve
Trust is not declared. It is accumulated. Every delivery, every support interaction, every difficult conversation handled with honesty — these are the deposits that build the kind of relationship where a customer calls you first when something goes wrong as well as when they are planning something new.
Our local teams across EMEA and APAC have built that kind of relationship over many years. They understand the territory. They react quickly when customers need them. And they are backed by a global organization that can bring scale and cross-market experience when the challenge calls for it.
What I am most proud of is that across our regions, customers are increasingly bringing us into longer-horizon conversations — migration strategies, multi-year investment planning, architectural decisions that go well beyond a single project. That is the signal that trust has taken root. It means they see us not as a vendor managing a transaction, but as a partner invested in where they are going.
Walking up the trust curve is not a milestone we reach. It is something we demonstrate every day, in every market, with every interaction our teams have. The quality of the relationships we maintain is the proof that we are doing exactly that.
Imagine Executive Blog Series
Want to see where it all started? CEO Steve Reynolds outlines how Imagine changed its internal culture — strengthening responsiveness, accountability, and delivery discipline to rebuild customer trust.
