In a move that has shocked many, 4 key Avid people with a combined employment record of over 55 years, have left Avid to join Gobbler, the cloud based storage and collaboration service.

This includes long time Digidesign/Avid veteran Bobby Lombardi. Lombardi has been at the centre of many of the key developments within Digidesign/Avid and has been regarded as a tour de force within Avid, not only being involved in key products like Pro Tools and Eleven Rack, but Lombardi was also moved in to deal with the fall-out after the closure of the entire Sibelius team in the UK.

However the largest blow for Avid will be the fact that Lombardi was a central player in the new Avid Everywhere initiative, his role was described as;

• Design Lead for Avid’s next generation creative products in collaboration, distribution, and online private and public monetization of digital assets 
• Product Management lead for metadata and rights management strategy 

This could not happen at a worst time for the company, Avid Everywhere is being championed by the current CEO Louis Hernandez Jr as the future of Avid. The other people Andy Hall (14 years, Senior Architect), Bob Brown (15 years, Principle Cloud Architect), Brian Chrisman (10 years, Ecommerce) will all be a great loss to Avid as they seek to gain traction on their Avid Everywhere vision.

Of course no one is indespensible, but for an already strained Avid, this event is bound to put back Avid Everywhere developments signifcantly.

Gobbler are investing heavily in the next generation of their popular cloud based media storage and collaboration service, having people of such calibre join them is really going to drive the product forward.

No parties were available to comment.