In early April, I announced we’d reached the stratospheric highs of Cisco selling VQ Conference Manager. A really, really, big day.
So, three months later, where are we?
It’s been amazing; demand for video is going through the roof and the multiplier effect from Cisco has taken that to even higher levels. We just closed our biggest quarter ever and Q3 looks even stronger with Cisco sales starting to come through in more volume.
Internally within VQ, our usage of video calls has trebled and that doesn’t include all the time we spend on WebEx doing customer calls and demos. On that note, one of the questions we get asked is “why don’t you use your own CMS for demos?” – the answer is that we don’t view ourselves as being a service provider and are not geared up to deliver high quality calls globally – Cisco’s WebEX has data centers and network capacity lined up to ensure great calls all day, every day. We want to be able to show customers VQ and not to have to worry about network issues between our CMS and, for example, a customer located in New Zealand.
Customers are sharing stories of their call volume growth. My favorite is one of our large financial services customers; their working from home numbers went from 9-12% of the workforce to 94%; their call volumes increased substantially which leads us to the best bit of the story – their CMS based system (a big, multinode cluster) enabled them to keep working across the organization; everybody kept working and they were able to respond to customers. They ended up growing market share because their competitors experienced patchy services from their cloud based video/UC providers with regional outages/poor service which meant they couldn’t keep all their employees working and because of that, couldn’t respond to their customers. Ka-ching.
Another surprise has been the number of ‘non conferencing’ systems we’re seeing where the pandemic has made people it impossible for people to meet in non-business environments. We’ve got a growing number of systems being used by prison services to enable family outside to meet family members inside. Having been around video for what feels like a million years, the idea is not new. What’s new is the scale and call volumes.
As a team, we’ve felt like our contribution to the collective challenge of getting through the pandemic has been to enable a large number of people to continue their life in a semi-normal manner using video conferencing.
Increased usage is driving interest in Kibana and questions on using it and creating customized reports. It’s been really enjoyable helping a growing number of customers use Kibana, discover they can use it and then how much they like it.
One of our long term, strategic, goals has been to make VQCM a platform for video/UC solutions. APIs are coming and we’re in discussions that we hope will lead to our first Strategic Solutions Partner.
Next stop, VQCM 3.5 in a couple of weeks. Thanks for reading.
Stay safe
Mike