I caught up with Eric Armstrong, President and CEO of Kontiki, at Streaming Media East 2010, to get his perspective on the state of enterprise video communications. One of the biggest challenges for companies of global scale, is the ability for leaders to reach and engage employees. Armstrong believes that CEO all-hands webcasts and video messages from senior leaders helps employees to feel connected to their companies. Since 2000, Kontiki has offered live and on-demand video solutions for enterprise video customers. The Sunnyvale, California-based company has built a SaaS enterprise video platform and a social video portal focused on both extending the reach of executive communications while increasing the engagement of employees.Koniki also knows how important security and control are to its enterprise customers in the financial services, retail, technology, telecommunications and manufacturing market sectors, and recently achieved Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70 (SAS 70) Type II certification, a widely-recognized auditing standard to validate and assure that it has the processes, procedures and policies in place to run a secure data center and video service. Kontiki is the first enterprise video SaaS solution to achieve this certification.
Eric Armstrong believes in the power of video, and explained its value in this way:
Armstrong says that many companies have been hesitant to offer high quality video solutions within their organizations based common misconceptions, or myths, about enterprise video being too costly or time consuming to deploy – a gap that Kontiki calls the video divide. The key issues within an enterprise that are different from Internet-delivered video are, as Armstrong conveyed, network WAN constraints, delivery bottlenecks, security and authentication reporting. He maintained that Kontiki’s cloud-based SaaS offering was designed to solve those problems, and can be deployed globally within just a few weeks."Video allows the leaders of a company to connect in a very personal way to every employee in the company anywhere in the world. Simple media, like email or voicemail is fine for communicating basic facts. But if the message is complex, if there's a lot of changes going on in an organization or if there's a vision or a strategy that needs to be communicated, a leader needs to stand behind the message – and video is the most effective way to communicate those types of messages. Video makes you the owner of the message.
A recent report by the Aberdeen Group titled, “Creating Video-Based Value for the Enterprise”, revealed how business leaders use video in their enterprises to maximize ROI. Aberdeen has seen a trend from “Video 1.0” to “Video 2.0”, with enterprise video transitioning from simple broadcast and videoconferencing capabilities to business-driven usage of video intended to increase engagement rather than just reach.
The top 5 video technologies respondents plan to implement within the next 12 months are:
- Video-embedded webcasting
- Social networking features integrated with video content
- Video optimized for mobile platforms
- Video broadcast ability throughout the organizations
- Broadcast video for corporate communications
“We see the biggest challenges for enterprise video as the ability to reach all employees on disparate and congested networks or in remote locations and to engage them in a way that inspires and motivates them to work towards a shared vision. We believe Aberdeen has tapped into the most pressing question for enterprise video today - ‘where is the ROI?’ - and uncovered valuable trends that can be practically leveraged by other organizations to build rock solid business cases.”Aberdeen offered several key takeaways from the report as recommendations for organizations seeking to optimize their use of video and gain business value:
- Consider the value that video can provide to improve employee engagement and retention.
- Strategize a plan for formal video management of all video assets, including a video platform accessible to all employees.
- Improve social feedback for video content, such as ratings, comments and sharing.
- Consider embedded and multi-modal uses of video, including live webcasting of events, such as CEO quarterly all-hands employee meetings
