On this episode of “Eye on Business Video,” Garrett Gladden – Senior Vice President of Product & Development for Kollective Technology – stopped by to discuss the increasingly important role that video networking solutions – called “enterprise content distribution networks” (or ECDNs) – are playing as more organization seek to develop a comprehensive strategy for getting the most from video streaming behind the corporate firewall.

Long before “artificial intelligence” became the buzzword of the technology industry in 2023, Kollective has been developing what it calls a “Smart ECDN” solution designed to leverage automated tools to help in identifying and addressing networking issues that arise during a live webcast. Gladden highlighted how Kollective is developing these purpose-built applications that employ enhanced data analysis to improve the distribution of video on the corporate network.

Gladden also discussed the role that ECDNs can play in enabling a common infrastructure that supports the distribution of video from an array of video creation and webcasting tools as organizations continue to implement video creation solutions from a range of vendors.

In this interview, Gladden defines the basic role of ECDNs in today’s video marketplace and identifies the features of corporate video networking solutions that are most useful to organizations looking to boost the volume of their streaming video usage in day-to-day business communications. Key themes highlighted in this discussion include the following:

• How ECDNs can continue to play a central role in corporate video strategy even as organizations embrace hybrid work settings more extensively
• What features are necessary to qualify an ECDN to handle the increasingly complex task of handling video distribution behind the corporate firewall
• Why implementation of ECDNs can play an important role for organizations motivated to implement solutions from multiple vendors of unified communications solutions

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Watch the episode here:

Transcript:

Steve Vonder Haar: Hi, and welcome to this edition of Eye on Business Video. I’m your host Steve Vonder Haar from Wainhouse Research and joining us this time, Garrett Gladden, senior vice president of product and development at Kollective Technology. Welcome, Garrett.

Garrett Gladden: Well, thank you so much Steve and just thrilled to be here today.

Steve Vonder Haar: Here at Eye on Business Video, we love to talk about technologies that help organizations implement video more effectively behind the firewall. And I’ll tell you what, Kollective Technology is one of the pioneers in this space. For well more than a decade – almost two decades – you folks have been in the business of making video work better on the corporate network.

And, in matter of fact, you were probably the first company to be independently providing those types of capabilities. You were ECDNs before ECDNs were cool. That said, a lot of people still don’t know what ECDNs do. Define enterprise content distribution networks for those who aren’t familiar with what Kollective does.

Garrett Gladden: Absolutely. And what is an ECDN is always a funny thing because a lot of times people are using ECDN – if you’re consuming video at your job – likely there’s something actually delivering it to you at the edge. But kind of what it is always seems kind of a little bit nebulous and another acronym thrown at us that we feel like we should know, but it’s sometimes hard to define or just not well known out there.

So when I’m at, say, a dinner party and I want to tell somebody about what it is that I do, the analogy I give is that if you had 500 cars and they’re in LA and you want to get them over to Las Vegas and you’ve got the 175 freeway in between the two. Most of the time you’d think, well, we have to line up all the cars tip-to-tail on the highway and send the first one and then string them all out along till the last one gets there.

And it takes a really long time before in between that first car arriving and then the last car getting there to Las Vegas. So basically at the end of the day, what we do is we build 500 roads at one time, send all the cars, and then we collapse the roads after that. And so really that’s just kind of an easier, more approachable way of saying that we make sure that we get all of the data to the edge of the network in a really, really fast way.

And so we do that through a peering mesh. By peering mesh we think of whenever I want video on the internet, the Player’s Championship is going on for golf right now, and I’ve been tuning into that and consuming that. And when I fetch that video, I’m pulling it down from a CDN. And so what we do is instead of having to go out through the corporate network and pull that down from one of the major cloud provider CDNs, when we push video across our enterprise networks, basically we turn every single endpoint that’s in your network into that CDN.

So instead of pulling it from a public cloud and going out through my infrastructure and pulling that video down, if Greg next door to me in the office just on the other side of this wall, if he has already watched it, I can actually just use him as my CDN and he’s right next door to me. So basically we just build a highway just between the two of us and we get that content there really, really quick. So hopefully that’s helpful and sort of helps define what that is.

Steve Vonder Haar: So essentially instead of driving all the way from LA to Las Vegas to get the casino, it’s like having a casino right next door and instead of having to drive all that way, you just walk in and start laying your bets.

Garrett Gladden: You nailed it.

Steve Vonder Haar: So, Kollective has been in this business for a long time. There have been others who have come along to validate the market alongside Kollective, but how do you differentiate Kollective against those set of ECDN rivals in the marketplace?

Garrett Gladden: That’s a fantastic question. So there’s not a ton of companies that do such a niche thing like this, but there’s some other companies out there. And so when we talk about what is our secret sauce or what makes Kollective unique in the marketplace, we really position it as our ability to route a user to that content in the most efficient way possible through different delivery methods.

Now ECDNs usually exist in about three different ways. You have one where the oldest way of doing it is just putting a caching box out there somewhere in your network. And this was usually hardware. Someone ships you a server and when you pull down that video content, it would actually get stored at your local office on that piece of hardware.

And so that’s just kind of caching. Or sometimes it’s called the pizza box model. So that’s model one. Model two is you install a little bit of software on your device at the edge. So this laptop that I’m on right now. You have what’s called an agent, you install that and that actually just turns the cache on your device on and then you can do the East West peering of the video there.

Then the third way, the most modern way – and a lot of the newer companies in the space that have done it – is what’s called the WebRTC channel that’s built into every modern browser or the real-time communications channel. And that’s really good for video and doing our meetings. Especially during the pandemic, we were all using WebRTC all the time so that we could have meetings online.

Now, what makes Kollective unique is we can actually leverage every single one of those technologies to bring the user to the content in the most efficient way. So we’ve got this really, really novel network wizard -tuning wizard- where you can just basically import all of your network location sites and your VPN users directly in. And it’s lickety-split.

And you can use caching in a breakout at the edge, and we use what’s called a virtual appliance to do that. So you can use hardware that you already have that you don’t need to buy new hardware from Kollective. You can actually just install our edge cache in your own infrastructure that you have today. You can install an agent or you can have browser-based pairing and they can all interact with each other.

And so that’s the beauty of what we’re bringing to the market is really we can meet your network needs wherever you’re at. So it doesn’t matter which of those models fit best. And what we’re actually seeing is that a lot of companies, especially in a lot of the digital transformation and moving over to SD LAN, getting off of on-prem. A lot of times a network actually has each of those needs.

So if you’re back tunneling your VPN users, that edge cache is actually going to be great where you don’t have to route everyone out through that big breakout in your network so you can take care of your VPN users. Or if you have people in-office and you’re only doing live event streaming, the browser is a great solution for that.

But then if you have some parts of your network that are using really heavy VODs, say you’ve got a training center, the agent works great for that because that lets you stash those VOD videos at the edge of your network and you can do the East-West sourcing of that content right there. So Kollective is the only one in the space that can join all three of those models together with a single implementation and really take care of any use case that you have on the network.

Steve Vonder Haar: Not to speak ill of our friends in the IT department, but network administrators can be a finicky bunch, can’t they? So every network is slightly different, and I guess that’s part of the advantage of having multiple ways to skin the digital cat, if you will.

Garrett Gladden: That’s exactly it. And the nice thing is – with our customer portal – we give you all the tools in your own hands. So we know that nobody usually knows a network quite like the network admins in a company. And so by giving them the tools right in our portal, they can actually do all that network tuning themselves. They can do updates, they can make sure that their content is getting rounded in the right way. And we make that all at the fingertips ready to go and really, really approachable and easy to use.

Steve Vonder Haar: And end users maybe are the one group that out distance IT folks in terms of their diva-ness in terms of using video. And what we see in our research at Wainhouse is that organizations just don’t deploy a single video platform. Rather the folks in the marketing department will use one platform and maybe people in HR have a preference for another platform.

Maybe the IT department wants everybody to be on this UC system or that UC system and can Kollective work in that type of environment where you got so many moving parts from a video creation perspective?

Garrett Gladden: So to be really, really transparent, Kollective used to have front ends that we sold into the market as well. And a lot of times we always thought historically that you’re going to pick kind of the horse that you want to win the race there from one of the collaboration suites or from one of the video front ends to deliver, to publish the video across your network.

And so you’d think like, well, this just needs to be Kollective Webcaster or another one of the large front end providers. Then that’s the horse that you have and make sure that your ECDN is integrated with them. And then you’re good to go. Well, what we do know, and Steve, I think this is kind of what you’re alluding to here, at the end of the day, the marketing department may love a certain front end and they might use it for the public webinars to do marketing, but then they love doing it for say the CEO all-hands (meetings) as well.

But then we also know that the CIO or the VP of collab, they want the collaboration suite to drive all the video online. And we know that the collaboration suite, especially lately, are building in a ton of functionality to do one-to-many video. So what we’re seeing -and this is a pattern that started about five years ago, but in the last three years has just exploded – is it’s very rare actually that a company uses one video platform.

A lot of times you have a blended platform where marketing departments will use one, the engineering departments use another, and then the CEO all- hands, they want to use something that’s a little bit more polished to have a little bit more interactivity. And so what we’re seeing is that almost all companies – both prospects and our customer base – are using more than one video platform to deliver.

Steve Vonder Haar:It literally becomes a video tower babble, doesn’t it?

Garrett Gladden: Exactly.

Steve Vonder Haar: Chaos ensues, how does Kollective help settle down that chaos?

Garrett Gladden: So that is one of the things that about when we started seeing all of this that we really wanted to go really wide with how many platforms can publish into Kollective. And so we have now every single major video platform integrated into Kollective. And we can support any of those video front-ends that you’re using currently because we know that that’s just going to be the way it is. That video is the default way that we can…

Steve Vonder Haar: Tick off some of those people that you’re working with.

Garrett Gladden: So we’re working with everyone from Cisco Webex to Kaltura to Vimeo, Panopto, Notified, I think they’re going back to the West branding. But we work with all of those major providers, of course, Microsoft. And what we’ve seen in the market is that some of these other video front-ends, they have an ECDN as well that they offer with their video solution or with their collaboration suite.

So whether it’s Microsoft or Zoom, and even Google for Google Meet, they all have an ECDN that delivers that video. But one of the things that you’re going to run into is this notion of, well, if you’re doing Microsoft Teams live events and you do the Microsoft ECDN, well, you’re kind of just able to do the that and if you want to run a Panopto event or a Vimeo event for your VOD, then you have to have a secondary solution for that.

Our goal is to really be able to be all-in-one provider, a single pane of glass to get you all of the analytics at the edge, all of the delivery done, all of the network routing for that content, all in a single solution – no matter what tool that you’re using to reach your colleagues and end users with video.

Steve Vonder Haar: And I guess for an independent ECDN provider like the Kollective, the partnering work is never done for those rivals or competition folks out there, you still open to additional partnerships?

Garrett Gladden: Absolutely. All the time. And one of the beautiful things is – with our platform and really a lot of work that we’ve done around how easy it’s to partner with Kollective – we’ve got a wicked smart SDK wizard. So we’ve really opened up the ability for companies to spin-up the integration really, really quick. We have a bunch of different models.

So, no matter if you’re using Video.js or Shaka as the actual player that you publish the video with inside the browser or inside of a client at the edge, Kollective has made it really, really easy to build that integration with us. And we give you all of the modules that you need to integrate.

We actually had one partner from the time that they signed up inside of what we call our integrator portal to having that integration done was a day and a half.

Steve Vonder Haar:Awesome.

Garrett Gladden: And when you’re talking about enterprise video delivery, that’s a pretty phenomenal thing. So we’re very proud of that.

Steve Vonder Haar: That’s like a blink of an eye.

Garrett Gladden: Exactly.

Steve Vonder Haar: It’s great to see you on the partnering trail there and that’s awesome. Now I have to move the conversation along here because they will revoke my analyst union card if – in 2023 – I don’t ask you about artificial intelligence and how you’re integrating machine learning capabilities into the ECDN solution.

So it would seem like you’re dealing with basic bandwidth issues. What would a company like Kollective or an ECDN provider be doing with AI?

Garrett Gladden: You’d actually be surprised. We will toot our own horn here just a little bit. We call ourselves the world’s first Smart ECDN. And really the reason why we say smart is that we’re actually using machine learning quite a bit. So, we actually have a data science practice now that we developed  when I came on board with Kollective. That was sort of the animating initiative that I was brought on to spearhead – really developing a data science practice here.

And so, of course, we think that we hired the best and the brightest – which wasn’t me – to do that. And we actually have developed a very robust machine learning practice here and have applied it to network traffic and network traffic patterns. And so what we’re doing with machine learning is we actually look at shapes of anomalies.

So, you kind of have what you’d expect for say the bit rate in a location for what we call the roundtrip time. By the time the video gets sourced from the public cloud, hits the cache or hits the ECDN and then gets played, and then we get those play reports back, that’s a life cycle of data. We know what is supposed to be your standard shape that roundtrip time is in.

And then we start looking at those standard deviations on either side of that. If you have something that’s has video working really, really fast in a portion of your network. Or – this is the important thing – we use anomaly detection to say if this is a couple standard deviations outside expected behaviors. We flag that location. Or even if it’s an individual user, we’ll do anomaly detection and say, hey, something is going on here that doesn’t make it fit into the regular shape.

And so what we do is we just use a regressive learning algorithm that says, we know from everything that this company has done in the past that this part of the network should function in a specific way, but it’s not. So let’s dig into that. And so what we do, so for all of you data nerds out there – and again so that we can maintain our union cards in the tech sector – what we do is an algorithm called One Arm Bandits.

And so if you’re really interested in it, you can go look this up, but it’s a really awesome one where you actually look at the configuration sets that are being used, and it’s a configuration optimization algorithm that looks at what is the most efficient way of getting video to the edge. And if we know that and there’s a pattern that where some delivery of video is falling outside of that, then we can actually flag the configuration set and say, hey, we’re going to actually use suggestive analytics without you having to lift a finger. Kollective’s going to surface what that is, show it to you and say, hey, if you want to fix this, pin the bit rate. Or, if you want to put an edge cache in here, do that. Or route this in a different way or create a smaller cluster of peers that are in one office.

So I’m not trying to peer with six floors up, but we’ve got 50 on this floor and I can peer with everyone here instead of going up or down across perhaps a bad Wi-Fi connection. So we do that and we flag that in real-time while the event is going so that – as a network administrator or even if you’re on the collab side – you don’t really have to do any digging. We’ve done the digging for you. We flag it, we do the anomaly detection, and then we just surface it to you and say, “Hey, we noticed this, you want to go fix it?”

And then that gives us just a really good chance at getting the very best video delivery and the set of configuration parameters that really optimize that video.

Steve Vonder Haar: Yeah, it’s almost like putting an experienced network engineer at every stop along the corporate network and having that dude raise the red flag when issues arise. So that’s really cool. So last question related to the corporate network, and it’s really, are we looking at the corporate network in a different way in a world of hybrid work?

Obviously, we’re still in flux with many organizations still trying to figure out how they’re going to deal with remote workers, how often will people come into the office. And in some ways some people have pointed to that as a challenge or a threat to ECDNs because – if people aren’t in the office – you don’t need these advanced networking solutions. But tell me where Kollective fits into this evolving world of hybrid and remote work.

Garrett Gladden: What a fantastic question. I mean, and that one is so pertinent to so much of just our workflows right now. When I think about this, I think about my own day, and so I’ll just use a little very short story about this. So, a lot of my colleagues are in AMEA – in London in, particular. And so when I meet with them, a lot of times I’m at home because I’m on the west coast of the United States and it’s 6:00 AM for me and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon for my colleagues.

And so that’s what works for them. So, the first meetings that I’m on for video, I’m at home. Now a lot of times I’m taking my daughter to school, so she’s a middle schooler. So I load her in the truck and then I’m on my phone with these earbuds in and I’m having another conversation with someone on the east coast of the United States.

And then I get to where I’m at right now, which is at my desk. All of a sudden, I’m in the corporate network. So just in a matter of three hours, I’ve actually bounced around to three different ways of getting routed to the actual data that I need. And that’s just three hours in my morning.

Steve Vonder Haar: Garrett Gladden is living in the future.

Garrett Gladden: If someone needs an example of hybrid, I feel hybrid almost every single morning. And I don’t think that I’m an anomaly here. I think that this is actually du jour now This is how we just work and this is how networks have to work. So a lot of times you’d think that well, peering just exists inside of the corporate network and that’s where you get the efficiency it’s creating -these peering meshes once the data is inside an office.

Well, it’s actually, and this goes back to what we were just talking about, there’s actually two really key things that an ECDN can bring you, even for users that are at home for that first part of the day or even on their mobile device. The first thing is if you are back hauling your VPN – and almost every company is because that’s the way that that VPNs are usually most optimized – you have all the security checks.

So whether you’re a zero-trust network or you’re going with the SaaS  route where you’ve got some sort of secure public access checkpoint there that’s inspecting that traffic, you’re usually routing your VPN out that way. So, the first thing that we can do is – if you put an edge cache in there – you’re actually optimizing your link from that part, that breakout of your network all the way up to the public cloud.

You can just say – for a video – I’m just going to have one request out and one stream down. All of a sudden I now have that in my backhaul where I don’t actually have to flood that backhaul, that breakout with all of those security checks. I already know that this is good content here, it’s secure content. I can service everyone at home that’s accessing the video at home.

Now two – and this is where we see a ton of value that our current customers are getting -even if I’m not peering and I’m accessing it from an Android phone. I’m loading the Kollective SDK on this and I’m actually streaming in all of the quality of experience, all of the bit rate information, all of the consumption information, all of the video title information.

All of that good intelligence that I have for my in-office users. Man, it would be such a bummer if I didn’t actually know how content was being consumed across the board. So with the SDK being loaded into all of our integrations, we actually can give you all of this machine learning, all of this intelligence, all this content intelligence just so that you know how consumption is happening, what is really good content, what are the patterns of good content and video consumption across at-home users and in-office users.

And so, by doing this, you actually get a ton of benefit for everyone in the network that’s communicating via video, not just those that are in office.

Steve Vonder Haar: And for network administrators and video producers, data is king, right?

Garrett Gladden: Absolutely. That’s the observability side and the intelligence. You can say, “You know what – Tuesday mornings – that’s actually not when we want to do an all hands.” If we want to hit as many of the users as we can, we’re just going to look at Kollective’s analytics, and we’re going to say, “OK, we see when we get the highest numbers of join rates here and that’s on Thursdays at 10:00 AM.” Just bring that up.

And so we know that we can say, if we want to hit the majority of users, we actually now have these traffic patterns and these consumption patterns that we can actually use and plan content around. At the end of the day, what we’re doing is we’re just trying to help people communicate better here.

And we do that through having actual data. And that data just kind of frees us to actually make good decisions both for the content that we deliver as well as for our network at the end of the day.

Steve Vonder Haar: Well, Garrett, I could talk with you about enterprise streaming topics all day, but instead of talking to ECDNs, I have to let you go so you can go back and to the process of building ECDNs. But I do want to thank you for your time. Appreciate you visiting with us on Eye on Business Video.

Garrett Gladden: Steve, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Steve Vonder Haar: And our thanks go out to everybody who’s watching this Wainhouse Research Research broadcast of Eye on Business Video. Please hit on subscribe and join us for future episodes with interviews with other thought leaders in the enterprise streaming marketplace. For Wainhouse Research and Garrett Gladden of Kollective Technology, I’m Steve Vonder Haar, thanks for your time.

Author Information

Steve Vonder Haar

Steve Vonder Haar is a Senior Analyst with Wainhouse – a Futurum Group company. His area of expertise and focus is enterprise streaming and virtual events.