Firstlight Media announced the continued expansion of its customer-facing resources in India and APAC to support growing market activity in the region.

Within weeks of new deployments by aha in India’s Tamil-language market and PLDT’s Smart Communications arm in the Philippines, Firstlight Media has hired Mrinal Ankit to lead sales engineering efforts that can expedite the adoption of the company’s cloud-native platform. Ankit will work directly with Navdeep Singh Aswal, Head of Sales, India and MENA, and Jim Vinh, Sales Lead, APAC, to meet accelerated customer demand in the region.

Ankit has more than a dozen years of sales and solutions engineering experience in support of Tier 1 content providers, pay-TV operators, telcos, and broadcasters, particularly in India and throughout the APAC region. Most recently pre-sales head for Setplex, he previously helped to shape media and telecommunications providers’ OTT and IPTV fortunes in product management, product marketing or pre-sales roles with Gaian Solutions, Altran India, Huawei, Irdeto and other firms.

“The ability of aha and PLDT’s Smart to quickly and seamlessly achieve market success has generated high levels of customer interest in our Firstlight Media platform,” said Balbinder O’Neil, Vice President, Solution Engineering for Firstlight Media. “Mrinal Ankit’s in-market presence, technology expertise, and product experience will be immensely valuable as we lead the industry shift to agile, flexible, and scalable cloud-native platforms.”

Firstlight Media’s platform is designed to build and run scalable applications in the cloud using cloud-native technologies, including containers, microservices, a service mesh, APIs, and immutable infrastructure. The OTT technology stack provides significantly better performance, a modular approach for feature expansion, continuous delivery for rapid iteration, and built-in scalability, observability and security. Forward-looking OTT providers such as aha, PLDT’s Smart, Rogers Sports & Media’s Sportsnet, Struum, and others are using the Firstlight Media platform to deliver services with the flexibility and the agility of the cloud, while equaling or exceeding the reliability and high performance of broadcast.