Distributor of Financial Products Primerica Opts for Archion EditStor

Archion Technologies, Inc. announced that Primerica, Inc., distributor of financial products to middle income households in North America, has selected its EditStor shared storage solution for versatile, high speed storage assignments by the company’s editors while traveling across North America to various live Primerica company events.

 Archion offers a EditStor media storage product line which is trusted by media departments within many large corporations around the globe. In addition to Primerica, Archion’s corporate client base includes Callaway, NCR, Shaklee, Sony, Uber and Twitch.

Mike Ziegenbein, chief engineer and VP with Primerica’s media department, is Archion’s longtime client. The department is comprised of about 20 people, including several producers, editors, and various writers, videographers and other support staff.

He comes from the worlds of broadcast radio and TV and joined Primerica in 1986. At that time, the company was installing a KU band satellite network between Primerica’s home office and 2,000 offices around the country – theirs was one of the first business TV networks to go on air during the late ’80s.

In 2009, Primerica decided to upgrade its system to high def and they concurrently needed to update their online storage and NLE’s from the small hybrid system they had been using.

“We needed something that was truly collaborative,” Ziegenbein said. “Our systems integrator proposed a system based on Archion’s network storage technology chassis. We were editing with Adobe Premiere and just storing everything on a GbE NAS. We wanted a high speed fiber-based collaborative system, so we acquired an Archion Alliance Pro, which worked perfectly for us for many years.”

Primerica has a large field force of sales people – over 116,000 across North America – and the company hosts sales meetings and incentive trips throughout ths year. Primerica’s media department produces these events, and is charged with video capturing all of the speeches and activities into their system with Mac Pros ‘on the fly.’ The media team then edits these videos while they are on site at these various events, and through high speed transfer, can post these videos very quickly to Primerica’s web portal. The same live TV formerly transmitted over satellite is now streamed every week on the web.

In 2016, Ziegenbein and his team realized they needed a versatile and portable high speed storage system they could use in remote locations. Primerica acquired the EditStor specifically for this portable use. Their on-the-go system is comprised of four Mac Pros and monitors which can be connected to the shared storage with fiber optics.

“After looking at the various options on the market last year, we realized that the Archion EditStor was the best value for the service and portability we required,” said Ziegenbein. “We can now take 30TB of super high speed storage, and all of our editors can share their files on the road. Our whole system gets trucked around the country to over a dozen meetings a year. The EditStor just works great. It comes up easily and does everything we want it to do – it’s docile and very fast. The EditStor is quite robust. Once we are on-site, it just wakes up and runs.”

Ziegenbein concludes: “Our remote-production demands have been increasing on a steady basis these past few years. Prior to our acquisition of the EditStor in 2016, we just did some peer-to-peer file sharing in the field. I’m sure in the future we will have to expand. Right now, the EditStor is the perfect match for our collaboration. Also, Archion’s tech-support team is highly responsive. They were very helpful in making sure our initial installation and user experiences were successful when we got the new system, and ensured it was up and running properly. They helped us resolve any issues very quickly and remain very attentive to our needs.“

“Primerica has a fantastic message that they need to communicate both to their customers and internally, and we are very pleased that our Archion products help play a major role in the creation and delivery of those messages,” said Dan Stern, Archion’s VP, business development. “I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Primerica media team for many years now, and I’m delighted they continue to trust Archion’s products and customer service on an on-going basis.”