Transforming Government with Video Experiences That Put People First

Jun 23, 2022 1:30 PM2:15 PM EDT

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Key Discussion Takeaways:

With the transition to remote work, many companies find it difficult to maintain employee performance and engagement. So how can you effectively communicate with your team to encourage collaboration and reinstate productivity?

Video communication promotes effective discourse and the exchange of ideas. Asynchronous video allows you to pre-record content and refine it to engage both your employees and your customers. By leveraging this type of video, you can deliver proposals to your employees in advance for optimal efficiency.

In today’s virtual event, Aaron Conant joins Rose Bentley and Alex Kottoor of Qumu and Hamza Durrani and Dr. Seth Berl of GovSmart to discuss how enterprises and government agencies can leverage video communication. Together, they discuss the importance of utilizing video for employee engagement, tips for maintaining compliance in government agencies, and how Qumu simplifies video content creation to optimize engagement.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • The importance of video communication for employee engagement
  • Hamza Durrani’s tips for maintaining compliance in government agencies
  • Rose Bentley shares the measures Qumu is taking to become Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certified
  • How Qumu simplifies video content creation to optimize engagement
  • Qumu’s strategies for securing video messages
  • Best practices for remote work
  • GovSmart’s use cases for Qumu
  • The difference between Qumu and Digital Asset Management (DAM)
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Event Partners

Qumu

Qumu provides an enterprise video platform that creates, manages, secures, distributes and measures the success of live and on-demand video within the enterprise.

Connect with Qumu

Gov Smart

GovSmart is a full scale provider of IT products and related services to the Federal Government and its prime contractors.

Guest Speakers

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson LinkedIn

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect

BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.

Rose Bentley

Rose Bentley

President and CEO at Qumu

Rose Bentley is the President and CEO of Qumu, the leading provider of a platform designed to create, manage, secure, distribute, and measure the success of live and on-demand video for intelligent enterprises. She is responsible for overseeing global operations and implementing the strategic growth plan for Qumu. As a voice for women in technology, Rose played an integral part in driving growth for four high-tech SaaS companies. Her leadership experience includes initiating best practices to strengthen operational performance, solve complex organizational challenges, catapult sales growth, and improve customer success.

Alex Kottoor

Senior Vice President, Global Sales at Qumu

Alex Kottoor is a passionate entrepreneur, business leader, and the Senior Vice President of Global Sales at Qumu. With over 19 years of experience in enterprise software and SaaS, Alex has driven revenue through the development of sustainable customer relationships and business partnerships in a variety of segments, including startups, small businesses, mid-market, Fortune 500s, and vertical markets.

Hamza Durrani

Co-Owner / Chief Financial Officer at GovSmart, Inc.

Hamza Durrani is the Co-founder and CFO of GovSmart, a full-scale provider of IT products and related services for the federal government and its prime contractors. Hamza founded GovSmart with CEO Brent Lillard in the kitchen of their apartment. They understood the mechanisms of federal government procurement and started their own company prioritizing honest pricing and customer service.

Dr. Seth Berl

Chief Technology Officer at GovSmart, Inc.

Dr. Seth Berl is the Chief Technology Officer at GovSmart, where he is responsible for the identification of products and services, building partnerships, and leading innovation. He designs and implements full-scale IT projects for the civilian and DOD agencies of the US government. Seth has experience in atomic physics, software development, and IT with a focus on both public and private sectors of the technology industry.

Event Moderator

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson LinkedIn

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect

BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.

Rose Bentley

Rose Bentley

President and CEO at Qumu

Rose Bentley is the President and CEO of Qumu, the leading provider of a platform designed to create, manage, secure, distribute, and measure the success of live and on-demand video for intelligent enterprises. She is responsible for overseeing global operations and implementing the strategic growth plan for Qumu. As a voice for women in technology, Rose played an integral part in driving growth for four high-tech SaaS companies. Her leadership experience includes initiating best practices to strengthen operational performance, solve complex organizational challenges, catapult sales growth, and improve customer success.

Alex Kottoor

Senior Vice President, Global Sales at Qumu

Alex Kottoor is a passionate entrepreneur, business leader, and the Senior Vice President of Global Sales at Qumu. With over 19 years of experience in enterprise software and SaaS, Alex has driven revenue through the development of sustainable customer relationships and business partnerships in a variety of segments, including startups, small businesses, mid-market, Fortune 500s, and vertical markets.

Hamza Durrani

Co-Owner / Chief Financial Officer at GovSmart, Inc.

Hamza Durrani is the Co-founder and CFO of GovSmart, a full-scale provider of IT products and related services for the federal government and its prime contractors. Hamza founded GovSmart with CEO Brent Lillard in the kitchen of their apartment. They understood the mechanisms of federal government procurement and started their own company prioritizing honest pricing and customer service.

Dr. Seth Berl

Chief Technology Officer at GovSmart, Inc.

Dr. Seth Berl is the Chief Technology Officer at GovSmart, where he is responsible for the identification of products and services, building partnerships, and leading innovation. He designs and implements full-scale IT projects for the civilian and DOD agencies of the US government. Seth has experience in atomic physics, software development, and IT with a focus on both public and private sectors of the technology industry.

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Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect


BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution.

Senior Digital Strategist Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson runs the group & connects with dozens of brand executives every week, always for free.


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Discussion Transcription

Aaron Conant  0:18  

Happy Thursday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder and managing director at BWG Connect. We're networking and knowledge sharing group of 1000s organizations who do exactly that we network and knowledge share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be, that's shaping digital today, I spent a lot of time talking to organizations on digital strategy when the same topics come up over and over again, that's how we get the topics for these events. I'm also asking everybody, Hey, who's working for you who's the best around. And that's actually how we get some of the hosts and the sponsor for these events as well. And so, you know, a couple housekeeping items as we get started here. The first one was, we want this to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time you have a question, you have a comment, drop into the chat or the q&a, and we can get it answered real time. The other thing is, we're starting this two, three minutes after 130 Eastern time. So after this, the official start, or to wrap up a few minutes before the official end as well, or try and give you plenty of time to get on to your next speaker without being late. So with that being said, just an awesome conversation here, around, you know, video experiences and implications around the government and transforming government in video experiences as a whole. It's something that's come up multiple times in multiple different sectors. And so we got some great friends, partners, supporters, the network over Qumu, who agreed to jump back on and help us educate the community as well. And also, they've got some friends Davydov, from GovSmart, so it's gonna be a great all around conversation. Like I said, don't hesitate to drop questions or chats in the q&a or the chat section there. And we'll we'll answer them all. But Rose, I'll kick it over to you first, if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Qumu. That'd be awesome. And then we can kind of go around the whole, so I'm good.

Rose Bentley  2:02  

You bet. You bet. Yeah. Thank you, Aaron. You're right. There are some exciting topics as we think about this hybrid work and where we are today, where we were two years ago. And I think even as we start thinking about the future of work, and I have a requirement. So yes, I am Rose Bentley, Chief Executive Officer here for Qumu. I have got my friends here from GovSmart, we are looking forward to just helping I think the market see and get an example of an industry that is really focused on making sure they embrace the power of video, and how you do that and some of the success stories and even kind of embracing some of that. So yes, Qumu is an enterprise application that we serve the best and brightest brands around the world to deliver high quality use cases such as SEO town halls, product launches, training, use cases, anything and everything you can imagine that you need to do a highly secure, highly reliable and extreme scale. So we serve the best and the brightest brands, like I said across the world. And we help our customers solve extremely complex problems through the use of video. So with that, I will turn it over to my friend Hamza.

Hamza Durrani  3:07  

Thanks, Rose. My name is Hamza Durrani I'm the CFO and co founder of GovSmart, we are a prime contractor to the federal government. And it's it's a other prime contractors. We're a small business, we're HUBZone. And we're excited to share this video platform with our customers because I think it's it's absolutely foundational. It is a resource that we have to have in a modern work environment.

Rose Bentley  3:40  

Thank you Hamza. How about Alex, you want to jump up next?

Alex Kottoor  3:42  

Yeah, could just quick introduction. Good morning, I guess or good afternoon, depending on where you're at. in the world. My name is Alex Kottoor. I'm the Senior Vice President of Global Sales, ultimately responsible for all new business development here at Qumu. Really excited for this conversation today. equally excited to be with our friends at GovSmart and speak more about video.

Dr. Seth Berl  4:05  

Seth, yeah, and great to see you guys. I'm the Chief Technology Officer GovSmart. My background is actually in atomic physics, software development and enterprise IT you guys had already talked about the company. So I figured I'd talk about me a little bit. So my role is little is more technical. It GovSmart, and designing and implementing full scale it information technology product projects for the US Federal Government, both civilian and DOD agencies. And we are just go smart, extremely happy to be partnered with Qumu to provide a video content management solution.

Rose Bentley  4:43  

Well, I think we all know Aaron, the smartest guy on the call is. Thank you, Seth.

Aaron Conant  4:49  

Yeah, awesome. So now just a quick reminder for those who have joined you have any questions, any comments drop in the chat or q&a, but that's just kind of a fun conversation as a whole and You know, it's, you know, part of this thing is all about putting people first. Right? And and especially, you know, the we're gonna be focused on the government side of things right now, you know, but you know, I want to just kick off opening question around, you know why video communication and content delivery, you know why they're crucial for employee engagement across the board. So, maybe Alex, you since I picked Rose to do the first, the first round of intros to go first with her, maybe I'll pick you first for this one. And then, you know, again, you know, anybody can jump in with commentary, but, you know, video communication, content delivery, you know, it's, I think it's putting people first, if you look at, you know, I'll give a quick stat. 88 minutes a day is what people spend on TikTok on average, which is on video based. So what do you think about this, in my mind that things like video is obviously

Alex Kottoor  5:53  

putting people first? I gotta get some more TikTok in my life, I

Rose Bentley  5:57  

think that makes two of us. Yeah.

Alex Kottoor  6:00  

Yeah. Thanks, Aaron. Good question. You know, Rose touched on it earlier. But I just think that we're going through some profound change right over the last two years, just the way we're, we work, we've been talking internally a lot about like the new work, right. And, you know, whether you're fully remote or in this hybrid environment, there's new challenges we as leaders are needing to face as we bring teams together as we grow teams together. And so I think a lot of it as video becomes like the new way of like, ensuring and driving alignment. Let me unpack that for a second. I think that, you know, we think about all Let's speak to our friends who are online here from different governmental agencies, not everybody is under the same roof. That was pre pandemic, they weren't under the same roof, right, different geographies, different time zones, different locations, whether they're physical, and now we add into that mix that some folks are at home, my wife works for a local government, three out of the five days of the week, she's at home. So when we think about how we're going to make sure everybody's on the same page in that construct, I think video becomes like Hamza said earlier, it's, it's like a must have, it's a foundational component to how we're going to create and ensure alignment. The other thing that comes to my mind is that old saying, you know, where like, you know, a picture says 1000 words, but a video speaks a million. I think about that in the constructs of, you know, how we're going to make sure that as new employees enter our organizations, how do they get ramped up as quickly as possible and as effectively as possible, right, like, so you're using video to be that force multiplier and how we're going to knowledge share, but also just knowledge and build in those early stages of being on boarded into a new agency or enterprise. So those are just a few of the ways I think about it. I don't know if anybody else hasn't has anything to build on top of that.

Rose Bentley  7:54  

I think the employee engagement specifically, right, if you think about even the power of asynchronous video, and how we drive that engagement across employees, like my personal update to the company, we used to, you know, have a monthly, all hands, we still have those but the contents different, we're now going to report out to the team weekly, every Monday morning. And when I started my journey with them as CEO with a four minute five minute video of like, here's what's top priority for the business, here's what's top priority for me, watch it when you want when you can just know that now you're you know, abreast of what I'm working on what I'm focused on what the team's working on. So it is a way I think, also to deliver engagement for the employees when they want it. And it's not as prescriptive. Like you have to be sitting here to attend this webinar at this time. You don't have to be that way anymore. And so I think that's another power that helps us drive employee engagement.

Alex Kottoor  8:40  

And it's a lot more it's just quicker, right? Like I think about like as a consumer of that video Rose every week, I think about that could have been a you know, two page email with 30 bullets or it becomes this three minute video that like I'm just going to remember a lot better in that in that fashion. Give me not to

Aaron Conant  9:01  

get older like Hamza, I'd love to hear your thoughts as well. I just think of it from an intonation message deliverability but also number of people who are actually consuming right because to your point, Alex, if you shoot me a two and a half page email, like the chances are slim to none that I'm going to read it that's that's the reality, I think is one of the a lot of the mindset is right. Everybody wants to scroll through something really fast. So I would love to hear your thoughts there around that as a whole.

Hamza Durrani  9:32  

Yeah, that it's it's something that I think is really influenced by behavior amongst the population you mentioned TikTok earlier. And if the majority of people are spending 88 minutes a day on tick tock and I can think of when I first started in my career, convincing CIOs and direct actors have technology to look at Microsoft Communicator, as as something that their workforce would demand and ask of them in the future. And it was, it was a tough sell back then. And today, I don't have to convince a CIO or a director of technology to look at Slack. Or to look at Microsoft Teams, that is something that they know that people are expecting. And if the population is really looking to video to learn, looking to video to gather information about different projects that they're working on, and to join new communities. So if I'm into hiking, I'm going to watch a lot of videos about hiking and learn what that community is doing. So that I can assimilate faster into that world, then the workforce is going to demand it as well. And we are going to need that particular situation, that particular solution, so that we can have the experience that we want to work. 

Aaron Conant  11:18  

How do you look at, you know, governance and compliance across civilian agencies? Right, that seems like, you know, something that's top of mind for a lot of people. And then we got a comment, a couple comments that come through, we can jump to but you know, governments compliance, love to hear thoughts on that.

Hamza Durrani  11:35  

Yeah, compliance. That's, that's a topic that hits pretty, pretty near and dear to us as prime contractors, we think of it as not only mandatory, but also something that that helps us maintain our competitive advantage within our industry, being able to maintain that compliance. So I think that the challenge of compliance is really complex. So when you look at what it what really is driving it, Congress creates a law, that law then enters the US Code, that US Code is then turned into the Code of Federal federal regulations. And now we must all comply with these regulations. And if you Google it, like if I go over here and Google it real fast, the CFR is 70,000 pages, there's no way a single person is going to be able to understand that document, let alone their agency's particular section of that document, it's just too big. So we have to rely on experts who live and breathe that compliance document. And I think video is one of those ways that we as leaders can give a resource to our, our teams and help them accomplish their mission effectively. The model exists for a, an awesome compliance practice within government and within industry. And it's pretty simple. You have a portal, where you how's the trainings, you securely transmit those trainings asynchronously to your team so that you can reach a vast audience. You analyze how when if people completed the trainings, you do trainings and retraining things. You have consistent effective communication. And you have you have a system that kind of police's itself, but allows experts to reach a broad audience in a manner that works for them. So that's, that's kind of what I think about with compliance is that it's a it's a very complex challenge. And in order to reach the people that that need to maintain that compliance, you have to give them that resource in video, so they can consume the information, keep their knowledge up to date and excel within their their particular job.

Aaron Conant  14:29  

So I heard comments around security. I want to get to that, because that's usually top of mind. But a couple a few more comments coming here. I want to make sure we get to one are you FedRAMP with the federal government? So that's the first question if we yeah,

Hamza Durrani  14:45  

that's, you know, it's a great question to ask because you have the CEO of Qumu on the call, right. But we do have instances where agencies have breached authority to operate and run this platform within government. So you wouldn't be first if you were to look at this platform. And I could hand it over to two Rose to answer that specific question.

Rose Bentley  15:13  

Absolutely. I mean, it's this is why we partnered with GovSmart is because we know there's an opportunity for us to help right? The government embrace the new video on the power of video. And how do we do that we partner with companies like GovSmart wanted to help teach us so that we can learn and be able to be FedRAMP certified when it's the right time for us in that journey. And so we've been leaning on Hamza and Seth to make sure we're doing that. And we're doing that at the right time for us in the company.

Alex Kottoor  15:39  

If I can just build on that really quickly, Rose, one of the things our CTO here at Qumu says is that while we are a cloud first company, we're certainly not a cloud only company, right? So I mean, I actually spent the previous 10 years of my life building a software company that pretty much served exclusively the federal and state governments. And I know how critical this is, especially with sensitive workloads. But one of the things we've done really well here at Qumu is that we have multiple ways to deploy the technology. So there's some of our customers who put this in our Google Cloud environment in a multi tenant environment, but all the way through to very sensitive environments, with enterprises and governments alike who want to put this system in behind their firewall holding their own keys, so to speak to the system. And so we kind of have a very diverse way of of rolling out the Qumu. Technology.

Aaron Conant  16:29  

Awesome. Love it. So next comment comes in is going back to we're talking about video as a whole in production. I think it's true. But from a production standpoint, I would think that the quality would need to be much higher than a two page email, or do you think that's not as big of a deal if the communication is meant to be more informal. And I just think personally, like looking back two years ago or more would probably be really high production used to be there. But now, again, with TikTok and everything being UGC, I think maybe it's more authentic. But we'd love to hear your thoughts as well.

Hamza Durrani  17:04  

I'd love to touch on that. Because I think that the platform itself gives our customers the ability to improve their production quality, in a way that is required for the audience to really engage with the videos. And I think Seth can definitely speak to the technical side of what makes the platform great and what attracted him to it. But just looking at the partnerships that Qumu has, with Speaker dynamics, and the courses that we can provide to our customers around how to improve their production quality. And the other integrations that Qumu has, it just it makes it a lot easier than grabbing raw video going into Adobe or Final Cut and trying to create something that is of high quality. I don't think that that challenge is as as difficult as it was in the past. And I have a background in in production technology myself. I think the tools we have in our hands, these iPhones and everything else are really good at capturing high quality video. And we can create content now. The average person can create content now that it's excellent, and people will engage with it. 

Dr. Seth Berl  18:39  

Yeah, and Hamza touched on it. The reason why people use TikTok or even before that vine is just the the absolute ease of use. So being able to take your cell phone and create content, make it look pretty, add some sort of audio or something else to it. That that really lends itself well to distributing that content and you feel comfortable distributing that content to other people as well. So I would say the largest barrier of adoption of those sort of systems in the enterprise is that in that difficulty of creating the content, because previously you would have or historically you would have needed one of the tools that Hamza was talking about an expensive tool like Adobe Premiere, or, or Final Cut or something along those lines. But that's just not really the case. Because having used Qumu myself, I know that content can be created for specific business needs. So you can put video alongside presentation slides, for example. So it is really easy to do content creation, whether it be trimming video, so they give you the tools that are necessary for your business in your enterprise, which honestly I think is a good feature and helps in in removing that adoption barrier that had existed for Previously,

Alex Kottoor  20:00  

you know, notwithstanding all the capability that Qumu empowers our customers to create high production, you know, high, highly produced video, I'll tell you in my own experience, I would say that the more I've been authentic in the what I'm delivering through a piece of video content, you know, not being having a great background and just being like in nature walking or doing something that's off the cuff like that, actually has created a lot more engagement in those videos, as opposed to something that has been highly produced. So I would just challenge all of us to be creative and have fun with it. Because ultimately, I think that's what helps drive again, if I go back to like alignment. And you know, and using video as a mechanism to driving alignment, I think that authenticity is super, super critical. 

Aaron Conant  20:51  

Yeah, love it. Love it. So another comment and just a reminder, others who have questions or comments, keep track, drop them into the chat or the q&a, and we'll get to them. Video engagement only allows for one way communication, referring to Rose's comment and starting the week by informing your team, how do you leverage that video to ensure two way conversation or collaborative engagement and feedback?

Rose Bentley  21:12  

This is an area when you think about like trends in the market or new use cases that are coming forward for us. We spent some time in New York City or a couple weeks ago to talk to you like what is our product vision to embrace a lot of these trends. And one of the biggest trends we are seeing is right is the expectation or even the want or the desire for leaders to be able to communicate through a video. And then you can do some of that, of course we allow for polling, you can attach documents, but just think if you could drop emojis or you could have communication, or think about how you share a word document back and forth, you're like, hey, here's, you know, here's what I'm thinking about my script to be and I just articulated through video, and then through the video, you can actually just be like, Hey, Dr. Rose, I think your intro is a little weak. I really like your background, even though Alex says we should be outside more, but I really like your background. But it's in essence, having that ability to engage in a video is going to become more and more critical, because they're going to become like what you used to see more on an email, as Alex has won earlier, and says saying like no one wants to receive those, you receive a video, but now how can you actually engage on that video. And that's one of the things we are really embracing even in our own product roadmap, because engagement matters, because guess then what you have, you have the ability to glean insights. So you can truly start to understand how your message is resonating. When where people are of course receiving the content, but also what made them give a thumbs up, maybe, maybe maybe give it a thumbs down, but didn't engage them. That level of communication in a video will drive our ability right to give further insights to our customers, and help them understand how their message message resonated, and what to do and what not maybe to continue doing.

Hamza Durrani  22:48  

I'd like to add something to that. When I think about collaborative environment, one of my core values is that you if you surround a problem with people who are looking at it from different perspectives, you get a clearer vision of what that problem actually is. And you have to have these these conversations in a collaborative environment to to solve complex problems. As a leader of meetings, you spend the first 15 minutes of your meeting describing the problem and getting everyone on the same page. And you can save a lot of time by having that that video that goes out to your team before the meeting, have that problem described get everyone on the same page so that when we enter that collaborative environment via another tool, or via a physical room, we can have a more meaningful conversation and get save a lot of time and get more work done.

Rose Bentley  23:53  

Brings the full circle around productivity, right of the first question, which is the employee engagement and why that's important. At the end of the day, what we care about as leaders is that our team is happy, healthy in the role and they're productive. And so to Hamza's point, like that's the power of an asynchronous video, you can deliver the problem statement beforehand, they can engage on it right and deliver that engagement to way and then all of a sudden, you're now coming into a meeting where guess what you're there to dialogue, discuss debate, and not be in a situation where you're listening to a readout, which could have been presented prior to the meeting. So great, great point. I love that.

Aaron Conant  24:28  

I mean, I couldn't think of it from you know, meetings these days are so much different. So they're just completely different than they were a pre pandemic right where we're all in the same building and a lot of cases you have the meeting you can see who's there and you can deliver it well now, it doesn't always line up when when you have a work from home, you know schedule with a lot of people that are you able to see you're able to track it's almost like deliverability is even better if you're able to track it. So what is tracking look like? How do you how do you measure who actually muted do you get that? And the backend as well, as far as data and analytics, like I sent it out to 10 of my team members, but only six of them viewed it.

Rose Bentley  25:06  

Yep, we'd absolutely deliver that you can only imagine after I send out that SEO update, if it's around the close and how we're tracking on new bookings 90% of the company reads it. If I'm giving just a generic update, I can go into the analytics and see oh, the UK actually hasn't watched the video yet. Let me actually talk the UK leadership. You know, what's going on with the dynamic of the team? Oh, it was the Queen's birthday. Oh, yeah. Okay, that makes sense. You know, so there's things like that, that help you, as a leader know, right, like I said, around your messaging, but you're absolutely right, Aaron, we can see where they are, how long they stayed on the video. And it truly like what the engagement was around the video, which is critically important for anyone that delivers video content out there to their teams. 

Aaron Conant  25:43  

Can you address just like the security of it? I think that's another thing as well, right? It's not just an email is a video, you're putting your presence out there. What is security look like? How scalable is it? You know, I think also addressing, you mentioned, are these a lot of videos just taken on your mobile phone and an iPhone or Google Pixel or whatever it might be? 

Rose Bentley  26:11  

Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that we're all speaking to like the power of video. And one of the one things we're not seeing news, right is the access to the mobile, right, where everyone wants to have the video where they're at when they want it. And usually that's on your mobile device. And so you're right, the importance of security becomes very real, because we are in highly regulated industries. It's one of our reasons, our partnership with Hamza and Seth is so critical is because we deliver the highest security most regulated companies, banks, healthcare institutions, government agencies. And so what's good for them is good for right majority of the customers out there, because you're right, they're delivering a highly secure, potential even earnings announcement, right love to earnings announcements now are pre recorded, could you imagine if an earnings announcement on a public company hit the market before it was supposed to hit the closing bell, like things like that are extremely important for our customers. And when they're that secure, it gives them confidence that they can deliver their message even beforehand, or make sure it's pre recorded, and ensure that it now has the scale that we're speaking to, as Aaron, you're kind of diving into, of course, some of the things that are really at the forefront of what we do, and specifically the vision and the architect of our product. So those things are hyper important for us as a company and also for our customers. And I know Hamza, it's extremely important for your company and says, customers as well, because at the end of the day, if the message isn't secure on something very regulated, it makes all of us nervous as leaders, and then therefore the reliability of the platform goes down. The message goes, I mean, our ability to communicate goes away, which is, as you know, especially in this remote world, it's number one for us is how do we communicate with our companies and with our teams?

Aaron Conant  27:51  

Just to go without say, like, are there like, faster, just just kind of harboring a little bit on the on the remote work scenario that we're in now? Like, Are there best practices in this new remote environment? Maybe I'll take that over to you. Yeah, I

Alex Kottoor  28:06  

mean, you know, the thing that I leave screams out at me is like, you got to make everything simple, effective and fast, right? Like, how many stories have we all heard over the last two years of all people are parents, in their homes, in very important meetings, kids are next door studying, crying, you know, life happens, right? And so like, I think this is yet another real benefit to video is going to what Rose said earlier, asynchronous video, when I hear that word, asynchronous, I think of really one thing, and that is, I get to record something when it's convenient for me, you get to consume it when it's convenient for you. And if I think if you pull on that thread, that's what we have to do in this new age of business. But we need to make it simple for our staff or shareholders, for our partners to communicate with us to to collaborate with us to work with us. And I think that, you know, that to me is what was what screams the largest we just really got to keep things simple and effective.

Aaron Conant  29:17  

Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's just the reality of where we're at and we're all consumers at the end of the day, right it's almost like Amazon has trained us and we've gotten to the soil and me now right and I want to have what I want to have when I want to have it and now I in the flip side as well as a convenience as a leader like that I have the the freedom to record whatever I want and still get that message across but not then demand that people are listening to my schedule as well. No, it's It's awesome. What I used to get a little bit into like Duff smart story and use case as a whole. So Hamza off kind of kick that to you. We'd love to hear your thoughts around. You know your story with Qumu Um, you know, it was that use case look like? Sure, sure.

Hamza Durrani  30:05  

I guess I can, I can start with GovSmart just our history. For those that don't know us. We started back in 2009, it was December. So that time of year, the holiday season that was going on, we really got going in 2010, when we received our HUBZone certification, there were two of us as founders. And today, the company has grown to just under 70 employees, I remember our first major contract was with DOD, that was a $70,000 contract. And today, we have in an environment where we have to be the lowest price technically acceptable, we have over a billion dollars in past performance over the years with the federal government. So that's kind of who we are. And we represent a best of breed technology vendor in every single category of it. And that's what really attracted us to Qumu. And having a solution for our customers in that enterprise video space. And I'd love to hand it over to Seth to see if he can add anything particular to what attracted him to GovSmart, and what made him want to work here and some of the fun projects that he's been a part of, but and then we can go into the use case.

Dr. Seth Berl  31:36  

Yeah, so my background being a little more scientific, I'm always searching for solutions to problems. And in the physics world, that's, well, what's going on around us and learning more about the universe. And really, it's only a sliver of learning a sliver of that. But ultimately, it's it's solving complex problems. So that's what really attracted me to come smart. And what Hamza was was sort of alluding to, I think there was that our goal is to provide an end to end full stack of technologies to the federal government. So we would be remiss if we didn't have a video content management system, and Hamza is is right on the money with going with the best of breed and offering those to the federal government. So Qumu was just logical there. So I hope that kind of provide a little insight.

Hamza Durrani  32:34  

Yeah, that covers it. And there's, there's a lot of things that we as a small company need to have with. With video. employee onboarding is a huge one for us. If you if you read the news, it's really difficult to hire people today. And we need to be as small businesses, we need to be a little bit opportunistic with our hiring. Well, that creates a challenge with our training program that has one person who has to train everyone that joins and the training class may have already already started when a perfect candidate presents themselves and we're able to bring them on board. So having a solution that allows us to do employee onboarding with video was was critical. There's another excellent use case that and I'm stealing a term from from Rose here because she, she coined it better than I could have. It's called ringing the bell. And every single day at five o'clock, people come up to my office members of our team, and they share their successes with me just naturally, they're just passionate about something awesome that they did for their customer. And having those recorded so that new employees and current employees can see that conversation when it happened at that moment that the person was most passionate about their success is huge. That's really cool to have within within GovSmart. And the last use case is I think, that I want to share and there's so many more. But the the one that I really want to share with everyone here is institutional knowledge retention. If you look at the workforce today, there are a lot of people who have built incredible programs within government agencies. And these folks are generally nearing retirement. And there's a lot of institutional knowledge of how we got here, why we did the things we did how we have been able to take care of citizens and accomplish our mission. There's a lot of institutional knowledge that should be retained. Simply by interviewing these folks, before they they enter that, that beautiful phase of their life, which is retirement. And I think that a repository of that institutional knowledge, just the history of what happened is a critical use case for government to have so that the next wave of public servants Can, can capture what what has happened, understand it from from the perspective of the people that build these amazing programs, and carry forward the mission in a way that that builds the kind of country that I want to live in. Right, that's, that's what I think is really exciting about the work that all of our customers do. And I, I'm happy to be a small, tiny little bits of it.

Aaron Conant  35:56  

So there's a question that comes in, and then I want to kind of get to like, future trends in the space and key takeaways. It says is your video content management system different from a dam, digital asset management? Or, you know, a pin tool, product information management? I think this goes along with tons of like, you're saying, I'm thinking, I'm making all these like training, you know, videos and or downloads of historical, you know, personal data that people have, you know, internally, but that maybe they haven't written down? And then where is it stored? And how is it stored? And is it searchable? So Alex, do you want to jump in,

Alex Kottoor  36:32  

I mean, I'm happy to jump in there. It's interesting. In my in my previous life, we actually had built a digital evidence management platform for our friends in public safety and military. And so I'm pretty familiar with dams, I would say, Aaron, probably the biggest differences, that what our ECM, or our video engagement platform is really doing is becoming a central secure repository for all things video. So it's not going to help us, you know, content in the way that a dam might do for you inside of the walls of your agency. But it does provide you all the necessary tools to create, distribute, and manage all that video at scale. I mean, one of the things I know Hamza and I have shared a conversation around as we started getting into the, into the federal government all types, all levels of government, for that matter. With GovSmart. Our DNA has been deeply routed in servicing some of the largest enterprises on the planet. And I think that their problems actually aren't all that different than governmental agency issues. Right. We're over the last two weeks, we've, over the last two years, we've seen an explosion of people using video, albeit typically not the ones it is approving. And so we have video now sprawling across agencies in places that probably video shouldn't be. And so when we think about how to bring all of that together, how to bring that back under the control and command of it. That's one of the unique things that our content management system is doing differently than perhaps these dams. Hopefully that answers some of your question, Aaron.

Aaron Conant  38:08  

Yeah. And more than happy to connect you, as well. And anybody else in the call afterwards as well? Yes. Thank you. Perfect answer. I think. I'm gonna keep it out of you right now. And then we can kind of go around the horn years, we get to the last four minutes here. What are you most excited about in this space? Or what are future trends that are coming down? We'd love to hear that. And then we can go to Seth and then to Hamza, then we can wrap up with row sound good?

Alex Kottoor  38:32  

Yeah, sure. I'll make these quick. Everybody already heard what my past life was about. So for me, this has been day one of being at Qumu, I said, why aren't we doing more in the government? I mean, if you think about why the largest enterprises have partnered with Qumu, it's for security and reliability, to have some of the most important things to a government. Right. And so I think we're like uniquely qualified to just partner in a very large wave via GovSmart with our friends in government. So you know, something near and dear to my heart. And I just know that we've already started to solve some major challenges for governments and I look forward to accelerating that. So more with our friends here at GovSmart.

Aaron Conant  39:12  

Awesome. Seth to you next. Yeah. And

Dr. Seth Berl  39:15  

echoing what Alex said, enabling what private industry is doing on the federal government side is absolutely paramount and giving them the same tools and great tools that are being used. The future trend though, for me is generally content creation, sharing distribution. Those are just extremely important, whether it be for employee onboarding, human resources, training, or even internal certifications, external certifications, or compliance requirements, be it internal to the company or external to the company in wanting to see the analytics on that. So that's where I really see a future trend.

Aaron Conant  40:00  

You’re next what are you most excited about?

Hamza Durrani  40:02  

Well, it's the thing I've been excited about, since the beginning of Gulf smart, it's supporting our customers mission and helping them be effective in accomplishing it with technology that that augments their their capabilities and their talents. That's what I'm most excited about why I go to work every day and why we love Qumu because of how they help us do that. And future trends. I think that everyone has really touched on what's going on with with video and what this this platform enables. But I see a world where we're not looking at binders, we're not looking at documents, people are using video more and more frequently inside their organization. And, and it's the trend is already there. I learned so much from YouTube every single day. And I think that employees need to have that internal resource within their organization and organizations need to control their data, so that folks can't learn their controlled unclassified information, right. So I think that that's, that's really the trend that I see happening and why we wanted to partner with Qumu. Now instead of five years from now, 

Aaron Conant  41:35  

awesome, Rose,

Rose Bentley  41:36  

you make me go last Aaron, and that is already let me go first at the beginning. But no to build on all of this. I mean, one thing that we love about GovSmart and we share is that we put the customer at the heart of all that we do, which means everything we practice around innovation and delivery to our customers is for them. And not all partners, you can say that with not all companies you can say that about. But it is something that we practice daily. And it's extremely important to us. I also believe that when you think about trends, you're hearing us kind of summarize this, but it's to really put the employee first. And it's one of my favorite books, which is employees first customer second, because when you have a very happy and engaged productive workforce, they are delivering the best they can for your customers. And then it's up to us as leaders, executives and partners, to continue to build innovation and create an environment for them to be successful. And so you're hearing a lot of those terms around the asynchronous video, I think that is here to stay. And I think it's going to be embraced more and more. You see companies even like Slack now dropping video into a Slack message like that they're committing that asynchronous video is here. And you don't always want to send a Slack message. And sometimes you can't tell what if it's a more complex topic, you can't tell my emotion. You can't tell if I'm upset. Or if I'm you know, I mean, you can't see that even in a Slack message. And a lot of times that's where communication or messages get lost, is because you lose the ability to relate to them and authentically see, are they leaning into the camera? Are they leaning away? Are they upset? Are their arms crossed? You miss all those those physical cues that you don't you know, that you might not be able to see in video? So yeah, I mean, I think engagement insights says that, that insights, we've got so much video content out there, we centralize it, and we need to really be able to understand how that video is being consumed. So I'll stop there, I could go on and on.

Aaron Conant  43:22  

No, I absolutely love it. I love the fact that I you know, you have another option to meet the employee where they're at. Right? That's the reality, it's may still be an email, but it also might be video. And then you know, the training aspect, right? Nobody wants to read fix it manual, they want to go like you say they want to go to YouTube, they want to go to a video channel and watch how it's actually being done. So I'm finally excited for it all across the board. But I do see that we just ran over a little bit on time here. So we're gonna wrap it up again, thanks to everybody who was able to send in the great chats, great questions. You know, our excess pounds arose. Thanks for being such great friends, partner supporters to the network as a whole. Again, anybody that's unwanted and more than happy to connect you with both companies here. And I think you'll have a fantastic conversation with them. I think they're putting together kind of the future of how corporate communications are going to take place. And so with that, we're gonna wrap it up. Hope everybody has a fantastic Thursday everybody take care, stay safe and look forward to having you in the future that alrighty, thanks good everybody hosting us.

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