 for video collaboration news. I'm Jamie Skado-Cutaya. Joining me here today, we have Mr. Dan Tanel. He's the CTO of Pinnacle, as well as Mr. Alfredo Ramirez. He's the co-founder and CEO of Biopta. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us here on Pinnacle TV. And Dan, let's go ahead and start with you if you can give us a brief introduction of Pinnacle. I'm Dan Tanel. I'm Chief Technology Officer at Pinnacle. Our focus in life is to deliver excellence in the customer experience for our customers in the visual communication and collaboration space. We're a premier managed service provider with presence around the globe. We have four VNOCs across the world to service our international customers. And we're very much focused on helping our customers deliver a managed video program for their end users with the right level of usage and adoption that return the right results for the business. And Mr. Alfredo. Biopta, we deliver to our customers the capabilities to monitor and optimize video and collaboration experiences. And so we are used by many of the largest global brands on the planet. We have well over 125 very large customers or enterprises as customers and across many verticals from financial services, high-tech, healthcare and government and many others. And we've been growing at a rapid rate, nearly 2X per year over the last four years. What trends are you seeing as a leader in the visual collaboration network video conferencing space? Yes, regarding trends, we're definitely starting to see that video collaboration starting to go mainstream as more and more employees and businesses are using it. In large part, its video technologies today offer better and richer collaboration experiences. We're also seeing that video call minutes is increasing at a much faster rate than just adoption of what you see in the public internet. And we see that based on our own customer base and from newer customers as we onboard them. We're also seeing that more and more employees are adopting private virtual meeting rooms with audio conferencing that was deployed back 20-something years ago. And we're also observing that employees within enterprise environments are also having more options for leveraging video collaboration across their virtual teams or engaging with customers. And so they can communicate via software clients like ourselves here today from a PC, laptop, tablet to a smartphone to web browsers that support WebRTC to hardware endpoints for group meeting rooms, setups to your personal desktop environment. And then finally, we're also seeing that businesses are not just investing in one video collaboration technology. You have your traditional players like Cisco and Microsoft and Polycom, but many of these enterprises or specific departments or business functions are also adopting other collaboration technologies that better meet their workflow needs. So it can expand beyond just the traditional players to newer players, cloud service providers to some of the newer enterprise messaging apps that have adopted video or that have included video in their technology stack. And so I think this creates an environment that's ideal in this partnership between WebD and Pinnacle because it's not a very simple environment that the support maintain and manage. That definitely makes sense. Dan, are you seeing similar trends with your customer base? Absolutely, very similar. I think one of the biggest trends is that visual communications has made its way onto the C-level agenda. And lines of business are challenging the IT organization to deliver a more comprehensive visual communication strategy and execution against that program. People are looking at resolving the video conferencing challenges they have within their four walls, but then now they're starting to think, what's next? How do I introduce that into my customers and my partners into my supply chain? So we're definitely hearing from our customers, certainly on the IT side, there's a tremendous amount of pressure from the C-level suite to deliver the right program. And they're looking for partners like Pinnacle and Biopta to help them along that journey. We're certainly seeing that from a trend perspective, customers are at different parts of that journey, and some are at step two of 10, and some are at more progressive in terms of further along that journey. And they're really trying to figure out how do I deliver a comprehensive solution to my user community where the user requirements continue to change. We've all come from the boardroom environment. It's moving out into huddle rooms. It's moving down into the desktop, and there's lots of technologies. As Alfredo mentioned, I think things are becoming much more complicated in the customer states as opposed to, hey, there's one technology, we just need to figure that out. There's more and more technology options. We have the big players, we have the next generation players, and the IT organization is generally struggling with, how do I manage this? How do I build a program? Where do I get these resources? Because I'm typically just using some existing skills I have, and I need to be able to augment. I think the last one I would comment on from a trend perspective, video conferencing has traditionally been in its own little silo from how you consume it, how you procure it, how you bill for it, and how it's supported within the organization. And if you ask the customer who supports, you ask your customers who supports the video, we hear things like the networking folks, the data folks, the telephones folks, facilities owns video, and they're really starting to take this application and bring it in under the umbrella of IT governance so it runs through the same best practice and methodologies and starting to leverage the tools, like what Pinnacle and Biopter bring to the table in terms of the analytics, the reporting, the alerting. How do we know how well things are performing? And that's, I think, where customers are really starting to look for help. Great points, Dan, and you're really talking to a lot of the key pain points that I think you're hearing from your clients and the necessary solutions that you're going to the table to solve them. Can you tell us how you're solving these pain points and I'll start with Dan? Sure, so I think if we talk about what's the one metric that the executive sponsor is looking to change, it's what's the utilization of my assets? We're making some investments, we built a business case, we rolled out this technology, and we're not seeing the return. And that utilization is 10, 15, 20%, and why isn't it 30, 40, 50, and why isn't this program growing? So we're certainly helping customers on that front in terms of our consulting practice, meeting with their end user community, talking about what would you like to see in the program, what are your challenges, really representing the IT organization to understand what is it that the user community thinks of the existing program and what are they looking for moving forward. And we often find a big gap between what the users think the service is delivering to them and the folks that own the program, what they think they're actually delivering. So there's usually a gap, so we perform a program assessment and we just help them understand and share with them, here's the best practices. We've been helping a lot of customers over the last 18 years, a lot of large multinational complex estates, and we've been through a number of the same challenges. So customers really start to appreciate and have in and start to gain some insight in terms of, okay, so we need to do this. We need to add a program manager. We need some more usage and adoption programs. Absolutely, technology is very important and technology is complex, but it's much more than technology. So we're helping our customers understand that there's a technology piece, but there's people in process. Do people feel comfortable being on video, right? That's also a cultural challenge that we need to overcome. And what's the business process that we need to make sure that we integrate, that we can support things effectively? How do we integrate our operational workflows into tools like Viata that allow us to see what's happening in real time? The alerts are being fed into our CRM application and somebody processes an alert at two in the morning when something goes bumping the night and we need to make sure we're delivering the right level of service. So we're really trying to help our customers with very limited resources be an extension of their team to drive their managed service, to drive and support their program and measure that success and deliver those results back to the business. Yeah, I really love that sort of white-glove customer relationship approach that you're talking about, Dan. Alfredo, what are you saying on your end? Yeah, regarding key pain points from our customers or for that matter, partners that are trying to leverage tools to better serve their customers, we see the job of managing and supporting an environment that's growing much more quickly like video collaboration is really hard at scale. And then you throw in different video collaboration technologies that are being adopted within the enterprise to meet the different business departments and the interactions needs, creates even more complexity as well. And so, Bob, really our goal is to make sure that we're making it simpler to better manage and support those environments. Some of the other pain points that we've... our customers have told us about that we have already built or we will be building out the support is around how video collaboration needs to... or they're trying to get a better grasp of their investment, their costs versus the utilization of those investments. So Dan touched on it earlier and so you want to optimally utilize or maximize the utilization of the investment that you've made. So you have to have visibility on what's being used and what's not being used. And then also leverage that information to either drive greater education training within that employee or knowledge worker workforce or improve the collaboration experience if it's an issue regarding quality and reliability or other. And so those are typically the major problems. Now the leadership of these organizations, and Dan was talking to that as well, is they're looking to get fact-based data or in order for their teams to make data-based decisions not decisions based on opinion, conjecture or other. So how do your organizations address that need for tracking analytics that really help optimize the networks? Alfredo? So VAPTA is all about big data. We're a monitoring analytics solution and we use real-time and historical data streams in order to provide the insights in order to increase the speed of troubleshooting or preventing issues within that total enterprise environment. We're also the same data set to provide insights to improve the speed and accuracy of capacity planning, budget planning. The reporting that Dan talked about for adoption, utilization much more that their users or their planners and management need. And finally, with the same data set in this big data environment to support benchmarking ROI analysis as well. All excellent points. And Dan, from a pinnacle point of view, can you tell us how you're addressing big data analytics? Some of the data that comes out of big data information that will support the further investments in the program. So, you know, demonstrate to me from a leadership perspective that we are driving the right utilization, that we have more people that are using this technology, that we are closing more business from a sales perspective because we're leveraging video to meet face-to-face with our potential clients. So that's very important from a business benefit perspective. You know, pinnacle recently announced our superstructure of things and, you know, you can imagine over the years as a managed service provider providing services to some very large brands, both directly as well as through our large carrier channel partner relationships. You know, how do you connect all of these systems, some of them are enterprise systems, some of them are service provider, there's data that needs to be moved around across all of the element management systems. It's fairly complex and over the years we've built an information highway, we've branded it the superstructure of things and it's about moving that data, processing that data and taking the information and making decisions using some AI, you know, I'll stretch a little bit there, using some AI in terms of making some intelligent decisions and feeding that into workflow and leveraging our global Dinox, we have four distributed around the globe to make sure that, you know, 24-7 support for our customers, whether they're subscribing to our cloud platform and offering or we're managing the run-prem solution, it's about how do we take that data, how do we integrate some of the tools that we've built, some of the tools that Alfredo has built and taking the best of the best to be able to deliver that service to the end user. We often look at, and our analogy is sort of the above the line, below the line. All the stuff below the line, the end user doesn't really care about it, right, and it's very complex and that's what they look for from folks like Pinnacle. The above the line is the user and what they experience and, you know, their experiences when I call in for support, I get access to the right support and expertise. I'm looking for reports and analytics and I were able to take that and be able to share that with my leadership team or my stakeholders. And the actual experience, me as a user in terms of how do I get into these conferences and then when I'm in these conferences, what's my experience and making sure that if there are issues that I'm able to get the right level of support. So it all comes, there's a lot of data that we need to take, we need to process it, interpret it, and then action against it. Absolutely, and it's certainly a lot of collaboration that's going on between your two companies as you both have already alluded to. So Dan, starting with you, can you tell us a little bit more about that partnership? So first and foremost, it's a very strategic partnership for Pinnacle. It's global in nature and that we can sell service and support. But more importantly, as we look to evaluate products and next generation technologies that are available in the marketplace, it's about finding the right partner that has very similar business culture. We're very similar in nature in that we want to listen to customers, we want to take that input, be flexible, be agile, be taking that information and feeding it into feature and product enhancement. So very strategic from our perspective and we've done some really good things in some of our customers today and we want to continue to do a lot more and add the technology. We have it inside of our global cloud architecture, we have it inside of some of our customers and the key thing for us as part of the relationship is we need to make sure that we're adding additional value on top of. There's a core capability there but how do we take those alerts and build a service integration module where we take that and we feed those into our CRM. We feed them into operational workflow so it becomes an integrated tool as part of an overall service delivery program for our customers. I will concur with everything Dan just said and I will just basically, I would say look, our partnership with Pinnacle is one of strength of the Pinnacle delivery standpoint we complement each other's solutions with a shared goal to better serve our customers and to really help Pinnacle deliver on its mission to empower their customers video collaboration cultures. For our viewers who may want to learn more please go ahead and check out Viopta.com and Pinnacle.com Thank you gentlemen for your time today and thank you viewers for tuning in to Pinnacle TV.