The way of business solutions

10The

Communication Solution

Fastest Growing

Unied

Providers 2017

10The

Communication Solution

Fastest Growing

Unied

Providers 2017

Accelerating the Digital Workforce Revolution

Accelerating the Digital Workforce Revolution

Vern HanzlikCEO

JULY 2017

www.insightssuccess.com

Editor's DigestReaping the Unparalleled Benets of Unied Communications

Editor’s DigestReaping the Unparalleled Benets of Unied Communications

UC ForecastUnied Communications Trends that are Driving the Market

UC ForecastUnied Communications Trends that are Driving the Market

Accelerating the Digital Workforce Revolution

COVER STORY

Qumu, an Enterprise video hub built by Experts

Vern HanzlikCEO

Face to face business communication has become a thing of past. The availability of high breed communication technology to enterprises of all sizes

is making it possible for businesses to effectively communicate with clients, employees, vendors and other stakeholders—regardless of where they are located. Mobile enterprise communication technologies are on the verge of yet another breakthrough, and that breakthrough is enterprise video.

Unified Communication (UC) is essentially the merging of real-time enterprise communication with non-real-time enterprise communication, for delivery on the same platform. When you consider how much enterprise communication is already video-based—corporate training, e-Learning, employee onboarding, sales enablement, marketing, product demonstrations, user manuals, executive addresses and so on—Qumu is a natural leader in the UC marketspace. Also, as organizations of all sizes and industries continue to adopt the Agile practices and methodologies, ad hoc meetings and distributed teams are becoming the norm and not the exception. Enterprise video is quickly becoming the backbone of not only the Agile organization, but of any Fortune 1000 firm looking to communicate more effectively and at a significantly lower cost.

Who is Qumu?

Qumu is a leading provider of tools to create, manage, secure, distribute and measure the success of both live and on demand enterprise video. The company makes unified communications video (Skype for Business, WebEx), social business video (Jive, IBM Connections, Yammer), executive addresses, training assets and marketing assets available to tens of thousands of concurrent users—inside the firewall, in the cloud, or both.

Many of the world’s largest companies leverage the Qumu platform for their video-based assets, including Visa, Toyota, AT&T, Bayer, Dow, Vodafone, MasterCard, CVS,

KPMG and many more. The company is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota with additional locations in San Francisco, London, Tokyo and Hyderabad.

Hard Work Followed by Success

As famously said by Colin Powell, ‘A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.’ Creating a history of success was not easy for Qumu, and in the journey towards success, the biggest challenge Qumu faced in the early years was finding its

identity—deciding who they were and what they wanted to offer, then focusing on that.

In the technology

industry it’s easy to get distracted when things change as rapidly as they do, but Qumu’s recent success and growth has come from focus: aligning what they want to sell with who they want to sell it to, as well as how they want to message it. When Product Strategy, Development, Sales, Marketing and Customer Support are all on the same page, a company’s success can be unlimited if the product is good. And in Qumu’s case, the product is exceptional.

A Long Journey with Notable Roots

Qumu has an interesting history, with roots reaching back to some very large internet technology players who helped shape content delivery as we know it today.

Qumu was founded in 2002, and was initially named Media Publisher, Inc. (MPI). Media Publisher was originally a software application created by the search engine company Inktomi. When Yahoo purchased Inktomi in 2002, Yahoo acquired the rights to the Media Publisher product, and then sold them to a small group of investors. After acquiring the Media Publisher product, the group founded a company of the same name, and spent the next six years developing the product into a full-fledged enterprise video platform. In 2008, Media Publisher, Inc. was renamed and rebranded Qumu.

Qumu’s extensible video platform

makes Unified Communication simple

for the enterprise

COVER STORY

Vern Hanzlik, an Enterprise Software Industry Veteran Vern Hanzlik, CEO of Qumu is an enterprise software industry veteran who stepped in the company in November 2012. Prior to coming to Qumu Vern’s most notable role was co-founder and CEO of Stellent Inc., which was acquired by Oracle for $440 million. He was also the president of Sajan Software and the president of TEAM Informatics prior to joining Qumu.

Vern understands what it takes to drive double-digit annual growth within an enterprise technology firm, and one of his primary focuses is on culture. Vern was instrumental in developing and promoting Qumu’s five core values— Innovation, Transparency, Accountability, Mindfulness and Collaboration—and believes the key to exponential company growth starts in these five areas.

When questioned about Qumu’s contribution to the Unified Communication platform and society at large, Hanzlik noted, “As the demand for enterprise video continues to skyrocket, Fortune 1000 organizations are increasingly being expected to provide high quality live and on demand video to any device, at any time, and with a virtually unlimited number of concurrent users—both behind the firewall and in the cloud. And the Qumu platform can already do that. Beyond that, imagine a world where companies can record, archive and stream every Skype for Business meeting with the click of a button and with no negative impact on its technology infrastructure. The nice part is, you don’t have to imagine it, because the Qumu platform can do that as well.”

The Perfect Blend of Products, Employees, Partners and Customers

The drive to excel at Qumu comes straight from the top, and Vern Hanzlik is the type of leader who won’t accept anything but the best—the best product, the best feature set, the best employees, the best partners and the best customers. The expectation on day one when Vern arrived was to be the industry leader in the Enterprise Video space, and the company has been aspiring to that standard ever since.

In terms of potential, Qumu will grow as the demand for enterprise video grows. And of course, the demand for enterprise video is growing exponentially as visionary CIOs

and CTOs see the evolution of video coming, and choose to be proactive before their internal needs for video outpace their company’s ability to handle it. But the key to growth at Qumu will be the employees, who are the true foundation of the company. Every department at Qumu is loaded to the top with smart people who care—people willing to own their roles, reimagine old ways of doing things, take risks, and do whatever they can to be the best. “When you have the quality of people Qumu has on staff, success and ultimately growth comes much easier,” said Hanzlik.

Customer Satisfacton is Priority #1 at Qumu

Like all growing companies, the customers are Qumu’s main ambassadors for success. At present Qumu’s customer satisfaction rate is over 98%, and the customer feedback as collected by some of the top analyst firms in the country tell an important and positive story. Here are a few pieces of recent customer feedback acquired by Insight Success:

From a Top Retailer . . . “Qumu is a great video platform that has helped our company is many positive ways. From the organizations and housing of our many videos to broadcast of live events, Qumu has been integrated

seamlessly into our day-to-day business functions. There have been hiccups along the way, as does any new technology brought into an organization, however Qumu’s strong customer service has helped mitigate these issues as much as possible and has been present every step of the way.”

From a Top Healthcare Provider . . . “We have implemented Qumu for the last few years in the health care industry. They have worked with our team on making sure that their player meets the ADA guidelines which are essential to our industry and members. Qumu offers an

Qumu helps many of the world's

largest companies to realize the

value of putting video to work

for their digital workforce

excellent and straight forward approach to their video platform interface. Many on our team have mentioned the ease as to which the platform is set up. The Qumu team has worked closely with our internal teams to provide timely and useful support. This is one of the factors that make Qumu stand out in comparison to other video platforms. Their reporting metrics are very useful as well.”

“Positive customer feedback is a significant motivating force at Qumu—our customers push us every day to improve our products, our service, our sales process and even the way we market,” says Hanzlik.

Marching Towards the Technology-Laden World of the Future

Like most technology companies Qumu is marching towards the

technology laden world of the Future with a vision. If things continue in the direction they’re heading with the company and the industry as a whole, Qumu expects to triple in size over the next handful of years. Between expansion of their reach into the Fortune 1000, creation of cloud-based offerings for small to mid-sized companies, and strategic partnerships with some of the largest technology companies on the planet, Qumu is poised for exponential growth in the short to medium-term.

What the Future Holds for Qumu

Qumu’s product focus in the near term is around its new Qx platform. A software platform is only as good as its ability to work in an environment and grow with an organization, and an Enterprise Video Platform needs to be a part of a Unified Communication

Strategy. Qumu’s new service-based extensible architecture—which they are calling Qumu Qx—offers open APIs to make our video platform easier for third party developers to add extensions. Qumu’s seamless integration with Microsoft 365, Skype for Business, Jive and other collaboration tools are a direct result of its extensible architecture, and key to Qumu being a true “unifying” enterprise video platform that can deliver cloud, on-premise and hybrid configurations to customers across the globe.

COVER STORY