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Kollective Technology: Enterprise Content Delivery Made Easier

CIO VendorTodd Johnson, President
Companies of all sizes and in every industry are adopting video communications as a way to stay connected, recover time lost due to traveling, and simultaneously cut costs in these volatile economic times. Wide-scale use of video content via Broadcasting and Video on Demand (VoD) services, and other media content delivery often outstrips the internal network capacity of organizations, seeking additional bandwidth, which can be both expensive and IT intensive to deploy. The Sunnyvale, CA-based company, Kollective Technology, offers solutions that leverage Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to address these challenges. The company’s Software-Defined Enterprise Content Delivery Network (SD ECDN) facilitates live video and large-file delivery on a global scale, without the need for new hardware. With an SD ECDN, enterprises can stream high-quality live video to all employees reliably, without impacting the network. “The solution drives a significant ROI and turns the promise of software-defined content delivery into reality,” says Todd Johnson, President of Kollective Technology.

Kollective’s SD ECDN solves the biggest enterprise network video and content delivery challenges by creating a software-defined overlay on top of the existing network to facilitate secure and efficient content distribution. “Endpoints become part of an intelligent grid that protects the network, together creating a distributed brain that orchestrates content distribution and traffic routing in real time,” remarks Johnson. “Each additional endpoint increases the overall “IQ” of the grid, making it even more adaptive and scalable.”

The Kollective SD ECDN enables efficient content distribution, whether it is live video or VoD, by sending only one stream of content across any given Wide Area Network (WAN). The intelligent grid distributes content across the Local Area Network (LAN) segment, thereby decreasing operational complexity. “We are essentially able to deliver the file locally without having to establish a stream for each one of those consumers (users) that would have to connect with the WAN,” adds Mr. Johnson.

The solution drives a significant ROI and turns the promise of software defined content delivery into reality


Complementing the SD ECDN is Kollective’s Network Readiness Test, a new solution that tests the preparedness of an entire enterprise network in the background before a live video broadcast. This allows one to confidently forecast how the network will perform, and what the end-user’s experience will be, during the live event.

The benefits of Kollective’s solution are well described within the context of one of its customer’s use cases. Schneider Electric, a large multi-national corporation (MNC) with over 180,000 employees around the world, used to send their top 1,000 managers to headquarters for strategic planning at the beginning of every year. After the meeting, the managers would then go back to their respective geographies and direct reports to execute on these strategies, cascading messages down through the organization in this way. Not only was this inefficient and costly, but also ineffective. The word-of-mouth distribution method did not provide for a strong connection between the executive team and employees. Not to mention, the messages changed along the way with each manager interpreting and articulating key points differently. By deploying Kollective’s SD ECDN across the global organization to enable video communications, Schneider Electric was able to reach 40 percent of its targeted employees directly on the day of the live video event and another 30 percent were able to consume it through VoD.

Leaping forward, Kollective has announced its new partnership with Microsoft to move its SD ECDN and Kontiki Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) to Azure, and to deliver a Skype Meeting Broadcast integration. The Kollective solutions will be fully integrated with the processes and workflow of Microsoft’s software offerings related to communication and collaboration. Kollective also has geographic expansion plans, growing its presence in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and Australia.