Meet Qumu

Videoconferencing tools like Teams, Webex and Zoom replaced the conference room during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic when millions of employees all over the world were working and collaborating from their home offices. But now, collaboration is about taking a hybrid approach — not about simply returning to the conference room.

Enter video engagement provider Qumu. The company comes to the market with its enterprise platform that can create, manage, distribute, and measure the success of webcasts, virtual events, and employee collaboration and training through analytics. The 20-year-old company specializes in asynchronous, secure video, whether it’s large-scale, company-wide town halls, or executives sending out short video messages to their teams via the company’s existing collaboration team. Qumu counts players like open-source video platform provider kaltura as one of its most direct competitors and many large brands, including Bayer, Kroger and Mastercard, as its customers.

Rose Bentley, Qumu’s former chief operating officer who joined the company in 2021, rose to the CEO seat in April. She’s no stranger to the collaboration space or the channel, having worked on Cisco’s Webex Experience Management team after the tech giant acquired CloudCherry, a company that Bentley was instrumental in “growing from nothing” in under three years as the organization’s North American Sales and Operations leader. In her short tenure with Qumu so far, she’s been heads-down focused on building repeatable sales, while transforming the company from on-premises to the cloud, Bentley said.

To that end, Qumu is currently building out a robust partner program that launched in Q3 2021 that is targeting resellers and soon, agent partners. Bentley, who is currently leading channel efforts for Qumu, is working with her team to ensure partners have all the enablement they need, because, as she says, “deals create partners.”

Bentley talked to CRN about the company’s growth in the channel, the kinds of partners the video provider is seeking out and what makes Qumu a valuable add-on to a businesses’ collaboration strategy. Here are excerpts from the conversation.