In the digital world we live in today, video is emerging as the mainstream method for communicating across large organizations. This medium is effective to an extent, as stakeholders of all levels have direct access to specific information. However, video lag continues to disrupt information-sharing, which causes businesses to hire more staffers to install more servers.
I recently chatted with Dan Vetras, CEO of Kollective, who explained how his team helps businesses around the globe off-load their networks and deliver video securely and at scale across their respective organizations.
“We’re the antithesis of what happens when too many people try to watch a video, whether it’s within a company or outside of it,” explains Vetras. “We alleviate the buffering, the latency, all the bad things that happen when you watch videos, whether it’s laptop, desktop or mobile devices. We’re the savior for video within big companies so that it works as advertised.”
Kollective is an all software-based solution, which allows businesses to do away with incremental hardware. Vetras says adding this incremental hardware fails to resolve video lag, citing the more people that are hired to monitor and operate these servers, means needing to communicate to more employees.
“Because we’re cloud-based, because we’re all software, we don’t require you to spend anywhere near the money or the time,” notes Vetras. “To deploy Kollective within a large company is a matter of weeks as opposed to months or years.”
Founded in 2001 in Silicon Valley, Kollective’s headquarters sits in Bend, and has offices in London, Singapore and India. Vetras was brought on as CEO in 2011 when the company was still in Sunnyvale, California, but wanted to set up shop where company operations and cost of living were substantially lower. After exploring Bellevue and Portland, Vetras and his leadership team set their sights on Bend, with 35 percent of bay area employees moving to Central Oregon. 13 employees began in the Bend office, which is now over 30, with 80 employees worldwide.
From HSBC, to Wells Fargo, to United Technologies, Kollective touts a global and diverse clientele, with 50 customers operating in Europe alone. Vetras and his team are expanding their reach into Asia and South America, as well as accounting for impending challenges taking place in tech.
Recently, Adobe announced that Flash will no longer exist as of 2020, which for Kollective, means transitioning to HTML 5. “The retirement of Flash is something we’re dealing with because our customers are big, global companies, and they don’t necessarily move to the newest technology overnight,” states Vetras.
“Another challenge we face is that there are a lot of new streaming protocols that are being introduced and no one is settled on one particular one. There’s HLS, Dash, Smooth Stream, so we’re having to support a variety of streaming protocols within our underlying technology. Beyond that, we don’t have the same problems we used to in California in Bend with recruiting and retaining thankfully. We’re receiving a lot of interest in the company, both locally and across the country. Without a doubt, the word is out on Bend. It’s out in the tech community, which we like, so it certainly helps from a recruiting standpoint.”
Recently, Vetras announced that Kollective will enter into the software delivery market utilizing the same underlying peer-to-peer technology, standing to be an exciting opportunity for the Bend-based company. “It’s a new space for us, but all of our customers are interested in taking a look at what we have because we’ve successfully proven to them that we can deliver video across organizations with thousands of locations and hundreds of thousands of employees. We believe the IT community will embrace our software delivery solution.”
www.kollective.com
