Title: Global Broadcast Partner Lead
Company: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Overtime: Rouyer is a huge rugby fan who pays close attention to the French national team. In fact, he used to play for the Los Angeles Rugby Club.
Why You Need to Know Him: Gregoire Rouyer has used his analytical engineering skills to help others along his career journey. “I love finding technical solutions to business problems brought to me by customers," Rouyer explained. "It’s something that motivates me every day.”
Interested in engineering at an early age, Rouyer attended one of the top universities in France, Centrale Supélec in Paris, and graduated with a master’s in engineering. He immediately went to work as a software developer with a small company called CA2S, based in El Salvador.
Don’t hesitate to explore different roles. Because you started in a certain a position—that isn’t going to define your career.”
Prior to joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) in October 2021, Rouyer made several stops, each in a different position. It started at Dalet Digital Media Systems as a project manager, which was where he really started to understand the needs and solutions broadcasting required. It was also at Dalet that he began working closely with system integrators across the United States.
He also experienced all parts of the world. He was based in New York at first, but he spent a lot of time in Latin America. He returned to Paris in 2013, where he took on one of the, well, chillier projects he’s ever had. “One [project] was to build TV and radio stations in Kazakhstan,” Rouyer recalled. “I learned a lot during this project. I’d leave to go to Kazakhstan for weeks at a time with my team in the freezing winter, working with teams from different cultures to build an ambitious and innovative solution."
Throughout his career, Rouyer has been able to pair his love for sports with the job at hand. While at Dalet, he helped launch L’Equipe, which was the first 24/7 sports news channel in France, providing NRCS and studio integration for this station.
From there, his career took him on newer journeys, each step broadening his horizons. Living in Los Angeles, he earned his MBA at UCLA and joined Chyron American as vice president of sales.
Now, Rouyer owns the partner strategy for the broadcast space at AWS. “I’m making sure that our media customers worldwide can find the solutions they need to migrate some of their production to AWS,” Rouyer explained.
In the post-lockdown world of COVID-19, Rouyer spends time exploring cloud-based strategies and solutions. “Before COVID, large media entities in the U.S. were already migrating some of their systems to the cloud and AWS, especially playout systems,” Rouyer said. “Channel origination has been in the cloud for years. It’s not a gamble anymore, it’s a very viable solution.”
The pandemic also expanded the use of remote production for sports and other major events. “The change we saw during COVID was the increased need for remote live production. Instead of it being a huge camera crew and a truck at a stadium for a game, production companies started exploring hybrid or fully remote models,” he explained. “You moved the production to the cloud. And that’s something more and more people are exploring. We’re seeing people turn to a mix of trusted on-prem solutions and a mix of native cloud solutions.”
Thanks to solutions from AWS, productions like the Olympics, often in faraway locations, are not only simplified, but more budget friendly. As Rouyer noted, the “cost effectiveness, as well as the scalability, reliability, and security of a well-architected, cloud-based system," allow cloud adoption to go well beyond broadcasting as a viable solution across all industries.
Rouyer is busy at work as cloud solutions and strategies are evolving at a rapid pace. Major networks, production companies, and even software companies are exploring solutions to make production happen on AWS. Channel origination is a large part of what Rouyer focuses on, but so is working with partners to build a new generation of cloud native applications.
Rouyer’s passion for helping others is not simply within the walls of his office. He serves as a board member of the Los Angeles Sports Council, a nonprofit organization advocating for sports at all levels. It shows who Rouyer is: an ambitious mind willing to take on any role that helps others excel. “Don’t hesitate to explore different roles,” Rouyer advised. “I started on the technical side and moved to the commercial side. Because you started in a certain a position—that isn’t going to define your career.”
