Biamp's Steve Metzger
Name: Steve Metzger
COMPANY: Biamp
TITLE: Director, Business Development
BACKGROUND: Because Biamp encourages lifelong learning for its employees, Metzger has found in his several years with the company that he can continue to improve through education.
THE CHALLENGE: Among the relevant possibilities for
SCN: What is your position, and what does it entail?
Steve Metzger: I'm filling a newly created position at Biamp, established about 18 months ago, as the director for business development. Our vision for the job, and ultimately what has emerged, is to seek out complementary strategic partnerships, scan markets, research, and find new market expansion
opportunities, and spearhead those initiatives related to each of these.
Biamp, maintaining a very collaborative and consensus-based culture, is an organization that requires active engagement from every person in the building. The activities I carry out on a day-to-day basis contribute to discussions driving decision-making. I aim to be both a voice and a producer in this job.
The role of this position is practically stated as one that seeks to expand the breadth of our opportunities through new market entries. Additionally it is focused on expanding our footprint within the market segments we already serve through new technology and marketing strategies. My challenge is to identify opportunities, methods, solutions, and partnerships that set a path for these things to occur.
SCN: How has your background prepared you for your new role?
SM: It's an interesting question since my position in the role, and the role itself, are so new for Biamp. I'd say there are a couple of key factors in my background that are largely responsible for the way I have performed the job since stepping into it.
The first and most important factor is my past experience with customers. Having worked as a regional manager for Biamp before taking on this position, I've had the benefit of working among, and learning from, some of the best and brightest people I've met. I consider these experiences and relationships to be essential in equipping anyone for a job such as this. It's important that we learn from our experiences with people as they teach us what is important to them, and subsequently how those interactions compel us to respond.
A second factor is education. Biamp strongly embraces the notion of lifelong learning for everyone at the company and supports that value in principle through encouragement and financial support. Continued improvement through learning is a cultural norm at the company.
What are your short- and long-term goals?
I've come to understand that this position is largely based on a long-term purview. In addition to developing market opportunities, business relationships and product solutions that support our ideas for innovation and growth, we're also especially interested in finding collaborative opportunities with companies that are complimentary to our business. Partnering arrangements can be tough to identify and forge, but under the right circumstances they offer to increase and accelerate value to our markets.
What is the greatest challenge that you face?
We are currently confronted with several very real and immediate opportunities, which may also be viewed paradoxically as challenges. We face the challenge, as all companies do, of choosing a development and growth path that best serves our markets and our strategic direction. Among the plethora of possibilities that we've identified as relevant to our business and those of our customers, selection can be painful since the natural desire is to do them all. We work very hard to make good choices in this regard every single day.
SCN: Where do you see your market heading?
SM: Markets have responded well to our refinement and deployment of networked processing technologies, as creative solutions to problems are increasingly necessary. We believe, as an example, that emerging distance collaborative applications require forward-looking thought into addressing complex new problems. Our work in wide-bandwidth acoustic echo canceling in an open design environment provides a solid springboard for new solutions to new problems as they arise. We certainly view emerging collaboration applications, and the future challenges they represent as one area of keen interest.
SCN: Are there new initiatives we are likely to see from Biamp?
SM: Biamp has a number of initiatives under review and development at the moment. For example, we'll be introducing a new CobraNet-based microphone console with an innovative user interface and sophisticated front-end control for AudiaFLEX. This development broadens our reach into paging applications where a single-cable networked solution is highly desirable.
SCN: How can systems contractors better position themselves to profit from Biamp's offerings?
