The latest spotlight in TMT Insights’ “A Day in the Life” series, highlighting the skills needed for success in Media & Entertainment (M&E), focuses on Brian Pelletier, Vice President of Technical Solutions at SDVI, a cloud-based media supply chain management company.
Our conversation covers Brian's far-reaching M&E experience, SDVI's approach to customer projects, the industry's shift towards cloud-based workflows and supply chain reinvention, and the advice Brian would give his younger self.
Talk a bit about your current role and what SDVI brings to each customer engagement.
I lead SDVI’s Solutions Team, which includes technical account managers, solutions architects, and customer support engineers, helping customers define and implement their supply chain goals from both technological and operational standpoints. We examine what they want to achieve through technology, and then we ask: What do their operators need to make the system functional, so that the customer’s entire business benefits?
What sparked your drive to go into M&E, and what continues to fuel your passion?
What else is there for a lifelong media guy to do? I’ve been in the industry for nearly 35 years, in one way or another. I was a kid who grew up listening to the radio and watching MTV. In college, I got a job in master control, working overnight on Friday and Saturday, before I was even old enough to go out for a beer. I started taking on production jobs: master control, directing news, and production manager duties. I did just about every job at the local television level, including graphics, editing, and set design.
Eventually, I moved into regional technical direction for sports, which helped me understand how systems interconnect and led me to engineering and pre-sales roles. I worked on early server and automation systems, think tape-to-server transitions, which led to work as a solutions architect during the “channel in a box” era, working closely with graphics automation and later systems engineering teams. So, it’s safe to say I’ve done a bit of everything.
Many projects in the M&E industry now involve multiple partners and collaborators. How does SDVI approach these engagements? Do you start with a common baseline and customize from there?
Yes, there’s always a baseline approach. For example, every supply chain begins with getting content into the system before it can be modified or processed. That’s a foundational technology layer that’s common across engagements. From there, and I say this a lot, but it’s true: The most important thing we do is listen to how customers describe their pain points and challenges. We then help design a system that not only supports them technologically but also wins the hearts and minds of operations teams. We never want to implement tech just for the sake of having tech. It must be a real solution that moves their business forward, whether they’re shifting to the cloud or optimizing an existing cloud-based supply chain.
SDVI is a long-time partner of TMT Insights. Has SDVI’s collaboration with TMT Insights led to new product integrations, such as combining Rally with Polaris for media supply chain management?
The close partnership between SDVI and TMT has been crucial in delivering integrated solutions to customers. Although each product is agnostic, our two companies and their respective offerings complement each other well, and, similarly, Rally and Polaris are synergistic in the way that they operate. Polaris serves as a single pane of glass that sits atop your existing supply chain, handling order management, demand signaling, systemic gating logic and operational dashboards, while Rally is the supply chain orchestrator, managing all content processing, application services and infrastructure. Working in tandem, the two systems minimize friction between back-end automation and front-end operations.
Not only do our two systems work together in tandem, but our teams also work closely together to ensure customer success. We have tremendous respect for the deep technical expertise that TMT Insights has assembled. They know Rally very well, and they understand the concepts of Rally-managed media supply chains. We share a common vision to bring agility and efficiency to media operations, and the combination of what my team and the TMT team brings to projects makes that vision a reality for our customers.
Cloud-based platforms look significantly different today than it was a few years ago. How has SDVI Rally kept pace with industry trends and changing customer expectations?
Early on, many companies approached the cloud with a “lift and shift” mindset, simply replacing hardware with cloud-based equivalents. Now, customers want to reinvent their supply chains with smarter, more agile operations that can respond to changing business needs. The cloud isn’t just infrastructure anymore. It’s a platform for innovation. Rally has evolved with these changes and today, it truly enables elastic scaling of compute services and the integration of third-party tools.
Can you elaborate on the specific soft skills and mindset shifts that you believe are most important for success in the evolving media and entertainment industry?
Technical broadcast expertise will always be critical, but development skills and listening are the keys for translating customer needs into real solutions. Their businesses are changing rapidly—whether it's marketing, sales, or content distribution, and their systems must keep up. Content is still king, but the speed and diversity of content delivery are accelerating.
How does SDVI's team approach continuous learning and stay up to date with the latest industry trends and technologies beyond just the training provided by cloud vendors?
The SDVI team takes courses on new cloud providers and stays up to date with changes in AWS, GCP, and other platforms, leveraging the facilities each provider offers. We also have regular conversations and meetings with our partners: What’s new in your product? How can we better leverage those tools to stay current with industry trends?
Our customers drive us in that direction, too. When there's a new solution in a space we might not have heard of, our customers often bring it to our attention. We spend a lot of time listening to what they have to say. Staying current is essential for understanding and implementing new technologies.
If you could talk to 2015 Brian, what advice would you give your younger self?
Focus less on specific technologies and more on understanding broader industry trends. You can’t be an expert in everything, but what’s most important is grasping how all the pieces fit together.
No single person can do everything the job entails, so surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. I didn’t fully appreciate that before building our incredible team, that everyone brings something unique to the table.
I’d also tell myself to get comfortable with ambiguity and change. This industry is moving faster than ever. Business models, tools, and technologies come and go, but serving the customer remains constant.
####
TMT Insights is a professional services and software development company delivering leading capabilities in the digital supply chain, including media content management, cloud technology, and SaaS/D2C experiences to global media companies. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills within the media & entertainment, digital & cloud technology space, our team offers industry leading services such as strategy and CXO advisory, product ideation & innovation, cloud transformation, process re-engineering and development to our partners. As early adopters of new technologies, we embrace the power of collaboration and work with our partners to combine our guidance with action to further drive efficiency, value, and scale to their communities. www.tmtinsights.com
