34 GENIUS INTERVIEW David Ross
growth. We’ve never not grown since then, which is funny, considering the company started with the idea it wouldn’t be a big company. It was founded to be small, and now it’s famous for growing perpetually. FEED: Can you tell us in what ways the company has most grown? DAVID ROSS: Every way you can imagine. It has grown with people, products and technologies, certainly. I don’t think my dad expected us to be one of the number one companies doing robotic camera systems when he started his analogue switcher company. It has also grown in areas – we were mostly North America-focused back in the day. It’s grown in market verticals, in trying to cater for the very specific needs of news, or sports, or house of worship, or stadiums and so forth. DAVID ROSS: Pursuing the small idea, he could do it all himself, Dad moved with a small team to Iroquois, Ontario, a little town of 1200 people on the Saint Lawrence River. Mostly because there was a runway there and Dad was a pilot, but it also had a bridge across the river to the US and was close to both Montreal and Ottawa, and it was a rural area that had some manufacturing in it as well. When I joined in ’91, I hired some engineers. They lasted a year or two. I hired some more and after about a year, they were leaving too. It was hard to get young engineers to stay in a small town. So I moved five people north to Ottawa to start an offshoot of our R&D. Since then, that has become the central hub and there are about 250 people in the Ross Video campus now. DAVID ROSS: Most of our R&D is in Ottawa. We also do R&D in something like 11 countries now. I think at last count we were in 17 different buildings worldwide. Iroquois is still our core manufacturing. Ottawa is our core research and development and head office. But we’ve got sales and service and demonstration offices in key locations around the world. There’s one in Reading, the UK. There’s one in Singapore, there's another one in Sydney and there’s one now in Beijing. The rest are places where we either bought or formed R&D companies. For FEED: What were the first steps in that growth? FEED: And Ross Video now has locations around the world.
IS YOUR BUSINESS BASED ON THE TECHNOLOGY YOU KNOW OR ON THE CUSTOMERS YOU SERVE AND THE PRODUCTS THEY NEED?
example, Abekas is in Sunnyvale, California. The Ultrix Router development team was formed in Virginia Beach and the XPression graphics solution came out of the Netherlands. FEED: Part of Ross Video’s expansion has been moving into new verticals. How has that progression happened? DAVID ROSS: I don’t like being bored. When I joined in ’91, our core expertise was analogue circuit design and production switchers. We actually had a strategic session; a few hours of soul searching. The world is going digital. Are we an analogue design company or are we a production switcher company? Which of the two are we going to be? It was a fundamental question: is your business based on the technology you know or on the customers you serve and the products they need?
In the end, we decided it was the product and customers. We had to change the technology we knew and move over from analogue to digital – which is not trivial at all when you’re redesigning the same thing with completely different parts and processes. I had a realisation when I started visiting television stations. You talked to the chief engineer, he would show you his camera systems and he’d know all about those. Then he showed you his pedestals and he’d know about those. And if there was augmented reality and green screens, he’d explain that. Then he’d explain his editing systems, his newsroom systems and then he’d show you his mobile and production truck. And then he’d go outside and show you his microwave dish and his transmitter. This chief engineer knows 20 different technologies and how they all work together. You, as a company, know only
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