This year’s Kollective EMEA Customer Council brought together over 60 attendees from all over Europe. This annual two-day London event gives our customers, prospects and partners – along with our team – the opportunity to learn, network, share stories, provide feedback and hear about our vision for the future of video delivery, software distribution and what’s next. 

I was told a few years ago that it is unique that we would invite our prospects to a customer event, especially one with a lot of story sharing and late-night networking. It is unique as these customer events are not always pretty. They can become difficult and tenuous and any issues with the product and services are openly aired. Kollective hosts this event and opens it to prospects, encouraging them to spend time, with and without Kollective, talking to our customers about our product, service and support because we have nothing to hide. If our customers have an issue, we want to know about it and fix it.  

As a matter of fact, over half of the features we built into recent product releases are the result of feedback and requests directly from our customers. At the end of Council, Kollective employees leave the room and we host a customer-only feedback session. In this session, we invite customers to come together and discuss what’s going well, areas of improvement and their wish list. After the session, they provide us with notes that our team follows up on. This is just one example of how our strong relationship with our customers helps guide our priorities and defines our technology and approach. Our business revolves around our customers’ feedback and their success. 

One of the biggest concerns that came out of the customer-only session in October was around Kollective’s growth into software delivery and beyond. Customers wanted to know ‘how will we maintain our high level of support during this heavy growth period?’ 

I’m proud to say that we have seven teams around the globe dedicated to supporting and providing service to our customers. Our support teams include event services, support, customer success, enterprise video strategy, customer escalation, customer experience and solutions architects, making up nearly 40% of our headcount. As our business grows, these teams will continue to expand.  

That may seem like overkill but delivering engaging video securely and at scale across the enterprise – from the security implications, to reaching remote locations, to each network being unique and everything in between – is a massive challenge. Our teams are dedicated to supporting our customers – helping them to build engagement via video and navigating the issues which often come with delivering these events.  

But we believe there is more to be done with our technology than delivering video. On an almost daily basis, news of another large company suffering a cyber-attack will hit the headlines. We’ve seen such data security breaches devastate even the largest and most well-known companies, resulting in not just a loss of company data, but also a loss of customer trust. 

In many cases, these attacks are the result of software updates not being installed in a timely manner . With the same 9MB client our customers use to scale the delivery of video, our peer-to-peer software-defined technology now helps IT teams keep their networks secure. Rather than having a server distribute the same piece of content to a few machines at a time, our bit-agnostic ECDN can help keep pace with major operating system updates and critical patches, protecting your business without impacting critical applications. 

Looking towards the future, we will continue to support new use cases providing universal edge delivery. And, as we continue to invest in our technology, we will also maintain our customer-first approach, delivering the very best experience possible for our customers.