Lawrence Kaplan

Chief Executive Officer & Executive Chairman SDVI Corporation

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Lawrence Kaplan is Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of SDVI Corporation, whose Rally platform orchestrates the media supply chain - the unglamorous sequence by which a broadcaster or streamer receives content, processes it into the dozens of variants distribution requires, and delivers it. He has spent more than forty years in broadcast and telecommunications technology and has built the same argument twice. At Omneon, which he co-founded in 1998 and ran for twelve years, the argument was that broadcast video belonged on networked computing rather than on purpose-built tape and video hardware; it was proved when Harmonic paid $307 million for the company in 2010. At SDVI, launched in 2013, the argument is the next step: that once the media itself is software, the operations around it should be elastic cloud services measured and provisioned like any other IT workload, rather than a fixed estate sized for peak demand.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of SDVI Corporation, which he launched in January 2013.
• Co-founded Omneon Video Networks in 1998 with executives from Sony, Tektronix and Grass Valley, and led it as founding chief executive for twelve years, backed by Accel, Norwest and Intel.
• Sold Omneon to Harmonic, Inc. in September 2010 for $307 million, then ran the Omneon division inside Harmonic and advised its chief executive until 2012.
• Built SDVI’s Rally platform into a cloud-native media supply chain product for receiving, processing and delivering content at scale.
• Signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS in March 2025, elevating a partnership that had run since SDVI’s founding.
• More than forty years in the broadcast and telecommunications industry, including senior roles at Sony Electronics Professional Solutions and a long tenure at Tektronix.

Professional Journey

Kaplan came up through the broadcast equipment industry in its hardware era, spending many years at Tektronix, the Oregon test-and-measurement and video systems company, and later serving as a senior vice president for broadcast within Sony Electronics Professional Solutions. Both companies were, in the 1990s, central suppliers to an industry whose entire workflow was built around videotape.

In 1998 he co-founded Omneon Video Networks with colleagues drawn from Sony, Tektronix and Grass Valley - a founding team assembled from precisely the incumbents whose product model the new company intended to displace. Omneon built video server systems on networked, file-based architectures, and the bet was that broadcasters would eventually stop treating video as a real-time signal to be switched and start treating it as data to be stored, moved and processed. Backed by Accel, Norwest and Intel, Kaplan ran the company as founding chief executive for twelve years. Harmonic acquired it in September 2010 for $307 million. He stayed on to run the Omneon division within Harmonic and advise its chief executive, stepping down in 2012.

He launched SDVI in Menlo Park in January 2013, less than a year later. The premise followed directly from what he had watched happen at Omneon: media facilities had by then converted to file-based operations, but they still ran them on fixed, over-provisioned infrastructure sized for the busiest day of the year, with no meaningful measurement of what any given piece of content actually cost to process. SDVI’s Rally platform addressed that by treating media processing as a supply chain to be instrumented, orchestrated and provisioned dynamically across cloud resources and third-party tools.

The company has been built on public cloud from the outset, and has been part of the AWS Partner Network since its founding; in March 2025 it signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS to deepen that relationship. SDVI itself now operates as a fully distributed company with staff worldwide. Kaplan’s title has since shifted from President and Chief Executive Officer to Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman, the arrangement under which he leads the company today.

Education

Rutgers Business School

MBA, Marketing

University of Wisconsin-Madison

BSEE, Electrical/Electronics/Communications Engineering