As video technology use surges, Qumu helps businesses navigate the new way of work
Qumu Corporation, a major player in enterprise video technology, has seen demand soar during the pandemic; Wells Fargo to support efforts for continued growth.
When organizers of a global fundraiser for suicide prevention ran headlong into the pandemic last year, their plans to raise critically needed funding were put in jeopardy. With only weeks to reimagine their biggest annual fundraising event, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, or AFSP, needed to quickly pivot to a virtual event. Luckily, Qumu Corporation’s scalable video engagement platform provided exactly what they needed.
“We’ve never put on a virtual experience fundraiser before, so we were completely in the dark,” said Erin Kenny, manager of AFSP’s Overnight Virtual Experience. “When we met with Qumu’s team, they told us how they could provide what we needed in terms of livestreaming video and prerecorded video. It ended up being a perfect fit for us.”
The Overnight Virtual Experience, a 16-mile walk from dusk to dawn, raised more than $1.6 million for suicide prevention during last year’s virtual event, nearly as much as its in-person events in previous years.
For Qumu, the AFSP project epitomized the kind of work that has soared during the COVID-19 crisis. With travel drastically reduced and most employees working remotely, demand has surged for video conferencing, collaborating, webcasting, and meetings through Zoom and other outlets.
Qumu’s platform can provide all of that and more through the cloud or in tandem with video conferencing providers like Zoom, company officials said. Beyond video conferencing, Qumu also stores, manages, secures, distributes, and measures the success of video content — value-added capabilities that have made it one of the leaders in the enterprise video software-as-a-service space, according to Aragon Research.
“Wells Fargo very much understands our software-as-a-service business and has worked with us hand in hand to ensure we have what we need to grow quickly and react to market demands.” — TJ Kennedy, Qumu CEO
Amid the increase in demand, Qumu has drawn on its relationship with Wells Fargo, which helps manage its cash flow and provides other treasury management services. That role put the bank in a prime position to extend its business with Qumu when the company needed additional growth capital. In January, the company secured a $10 million revolving line of credit through Wells Fargo Technology Banking Group to assist its growth and operational expenses.
“Wells Fargo very much understands our software-as-a-service business and has worked with us hand in hand to ensure we have what we need to grow quickly and react to market demands,” Qumu CEO TJ Kennedy said.
The financing helped Qumu on several fronts, particularly in providing working capital for day-to-day operations, and financing growth initiatives, according to Alex Hoppe, the bank’s relationship manager for Qumu. “Given the tailwinds we have seen during the pandemic, we believe Qumu’s technology is more coveted than ever,” he said. “Wells Fargo had the opportunity to provide Qumu with the capital to continue on its growth path.”
Even before the pandemic, Qumu had been at the forefront of enterprise video services for Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies, according to Kennedy. “What really changed during the pandemic is that so many employees went off-site and stayed off-site, the cloud technology really took off,” he said. “We anticipate that this trend will continue to grow and become a permanent characteristic of the post-pandemic enterprise workforce, making video engagement tools, such as Qumu’s enterprise video software-as-a-service solution, highly relevant for day-to-day enterprise communication and engagement.”
Qumu has amassed an impressive global clientele, with some of the largest companies around the globe. “We believe that one of Qumu’s key differentiators in the market for mid-sized to large enterprises is the scalability of our technology, which can handle hundreds of thousands of viewers seamlessly, for both live streaming events and use of video-on-demand assets,” Kennedy said.
“This has been particularly evident in the health care and pharmaceutical industries,” he said. “You can imagine during the pandemic, they’ve been right in the middle of it all, needing to communicate critical health information in real time and on demand. Through the Qumu platform, they are able to talk to literally hundreds of thousands of employees every single day to update them on the vaccine rollout, what shipments are happening, and what logistics are occurring.”
For every business, no matter their size, having the ability to pivot quickly and use video technology to engage with all employees, customers, and partners as part of daily communications is mission critical in today’s challenging environment, and moving forward.
