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Vern Hanzlik, President and CEOIn the following interview with CIOApplications, Vern Hanzlik, the President and CEO of Qumu Corporation, speaks about the company’s background, the quality of services they provide, the client onboarding methodology, and other factors that amount to their competitive edge in the unified communications market space.
Could you provide a brief overview of your company?
As an enterprise software company, we provide SaaS, hybrid, and on-premise deployments of our software to the Global 2000 companies in seven key verticals. One of our focuses is extending unified communication technologies, like video conferencing, so that our clients can securely stream to large audiences ranging anywhere from 100 live attendees to 100,000+. Our Qumu Enterprise Video as a Service (EVaaS)™ end-to-end platform allows organizations to drive employee engagement by enhancing their executive communications, employee communications, and marketing communications. It not only modernizes the workplace but also provides a more efficient and effective way to share knowledge in an easier and better way.
Our clients can not only use the Qumu platform to stream live events, but also manage video assets for on-demand requests and secure them for further use. Through the use of transcoded video streams and edge devices, customers can easily experience high-quality broadcasts according to the bitrates from their standard workstations, personal mobile devices, or virtual desktop interface (VDIs).
We provide our clients with the ability to deliver video across the enterprise for a wide variety of use cases including executive webcasts, training, onboarding, team collaboration and of course event virtualization
Would you like to elaborate on the current pandemic and how Qumu is helping clients run their operations?
Today, obviously the unified communications or video conferencing is a very hot topic for almost every organization in the world. The demand for our cloud platform, where people want to have external communication to run their live events, has increased significantly. There has been a 30x increase in our cloud platform activity for both live and on-demand video over the last two months alone. We have four offices globally—fully functional for the last 45 days, which includes sales, marketing, customer success, and engineering departments. We have transformed our business into a virtual organization and use tools like Slack, Zoom, and other Microsoft products to provide services to our clients, and now we are helping our clients do the same. For example, one of our existing customers is going to run an event to accommodate 25,000 people internally on our cloud platform. These events are continuously growing in size, based on the work-from-home community that relies on executive communications, establishing a huge requirement in the video-on-demand services. It has increased our business opportunities as well as our reach in the market.
Could you describe the key features of your platform, how it works, and what kind of benefits do the clients get out of it?
We provide our clients with the ability to deliver video across the enterprise for a wide variety of use cases including executive webcasts, training, onboarding, team collaboration and of course event virtualization.
Our solution features Intelligent Ingest, wherein we provide integrations to the video conferencing world in a much broader perspective. The Qumu EVaaS platform automates and intelligently transcodes video streams, creates thumbnails, and even indexes video for search and routes video assets to portals and management systems based on the customizable distribution rules.
The second major piece of the service platform is the management piece, where the business data is transformed into formats dynamically so that they can be re-useable on demand. We also provide transcripts of the video files both in English or multi-language, depending on the configuration.
Qumu’s Advanced Analytics generates actionable insights at the network as well as at the individual user level. It provides visibility on the performance of events to the IT staff, business leaders, and communication teams. It delivers real-time analytics and alerts, and also, the insights can be filtered and viewed across multiple presentations and events, including downloading and exporting to MS Excel for further reporting and analysis.
Additionally, one of the most important aspects is our intelligent delivery service, which is known as the Pathfinder which when combined with the eCDN Qumu Pathfinder Edge provides network friendly, intelligent delivery of videos and associated media content. It is a powerful and robust device that can easily minimize the impact of live webcasting on network traffic and provides real-time data about video performance and Pathfinder Edge usage throughout the network.
Could you site a successful case study and some of the challenges that one of your clients faced before they collaborated with you, and how did you help them?
One of our customers had a failed platform for streaming events, and they needed something to work quickly. We put up our cloud application in a matter of days, and they were able to run around ten events on our cloud application for more than 7000 people. We have also created a three-year commitment, and now they use our platform at least four times per day.
We have another client, a manufacturer, who is driving towards both executive communication and also self-service, where they use video conferencing as a front end to create cell service to do their broadcast. We noticed that the client had a dealer network all across the US, and they needed to communicate to its customers on an ad hoc basis for information that was tested sensitive. We were able to stand that out with a very successful deployment and have at least 10 to 12 use cases to help them in their functioning.
What are your plans for the next 12 to 18 months as an organization, especially in the current pandemic situation?
We believe from an organizational perspective that this pandemic has been a pivotal point for many businesses to rethink their ongoing processes. This has been a triggering point as to why unified communications in today’s world have become such an important factor in running a company. We believe effective communication between the executives and the employees creates a big effect on the organization. We are looking forward to developing features such as componentization, autonomous computing, and multi-cloud capabilities to our services along with including AI-based tools so that our platform becomes more dynamic.
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