Qligent Appoints Business Development And Sales Engineering Posts

Qligent has appointed Art Leisey and Lang Cooksey to newly created business development and sales engineering roles, effective immediately.

Both positions report to John Shoemaker, Qligent's Director of Sales.

The two positions were developed to address business growth in the broadband and broadcast markets, according to Shoemaker. Leisey will serve as Business Development Manager and focus on the North American broadband market, with an emphasis on cable, IPTV and OTT service providers. Cooksey will serve as Project Manager and Sales Engineer and assist Qligent customers in both verticals worldwide on all technical matters throughout the sales journey.

Leisey brings three decades of broadband industry experience and problem-solving innovation to his new role. As president and owner of CableCom Specialists, Leisey developed the first PC-based switching system which allowed Emergency Alert System integration into a complete Cable TV channel lineup. He later sold the technology to Trilithic, where he served as Director of Technology for nearly 15 years. This led to the formation of Trilithic’s EAS division, where Leisey successfully directed development of protocols and procedures for EAS systems throughout North America and Canada.

Leisey's innovations at CableCom Specialists also include hardware and software tools to support early pay-per-view movie switching systems, with several deployments to Top 10 MSOs. He later held technical and regional sales management positions at Alltec Global and Mega Hertz, where he further developed long-term business relationships with leading cable and telecom service providers.

Leisey believes that Qligent's technology will help solve the escalating quality of experience (QoE) that consumers face with broadband video delivery, particularly with OTT services. "The quality of experience is, at best, lacking within these services," he said. "Consumers are quick to unsubscribe, or move on to another option, if the service is problematic. Qligent brings a problem-solving approach in collecting metrics and data on signals from the source point to the end user, which will help our customers win the battle against churn. Importantly, Qligent's Vision platform uses common-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware that quickly delivers an ROI for broadband service providers."

Cooksey's 15 years of broadcast and IT experience make him a perfect fit for his project management and sales engineering responsibilities at Qligent, where he will help customers initial system designs, field applications and post-deployment problem-solving among other tasks. Cooksey has held roles of increasing responsibility with some of the broadcast industry’s biggest names, including Harris Broadcast, Snell and Vizrt.

He joins Qligent from Telestream, where he spent five years as Enterprise Sales Engineer. At Telestream, he specialized in helping customers migrate from on-premise to cloud workflows — an opportunity he expects to see often at Qligent.