So far in our Meet our partners serie, we have focused on our North American partners. But Adobe Connect is actually sold worldwide via a network of trusted partners who in addition to delivering the software provide additional services to our customers and ensure your Adobe Connect deployment will be successful. Today, late us take you down under to Sydney, Australia where we talk to Larry Adler, owner and COO of webqem.
Guillaume Privat (Adobe): Good day Larry. Can you give us a quick overview of webqem?
Larry Adler (WebQEM): webqem’s head office is located in Sydney Australia, with satellite offices in New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, USA and soon to be in Vietnam. We have been in business since 1999 and we focus with Adobe Connect on the Asia Pacific rim. We have clients right across the region including China, Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, New Zealand and of course Australia. Our company is founded on the premise of delivering outstanding online solution for our clients. We focus on customer engagement using the Internet. We have approximately 45 people in our team covering digital strategy, creative, development, tech services and solutions. We have over 400 clients using Adobe Connect specifically and have just reached, in 2012, a milestone of over 10,000 projects for our clients. Webqem has been a long term Adobe partner in fact we go back to the Macromedia / Allaire days. We have been with Adobe Connect right back to Breeze 3.2 days when Macromedia purchased Presida. I think this was mid 2003 if my memory is correct.
GP: What would you say is unique about webqem?
LA: webqem has single minded focused on long term partnerships with our clients. With this in mind, our team works with our clients holistically for the long term. So we provide services from the beginning of the engagement to the end. We start with the analysis of the business need, understanding of the constraints and technical environment, budget, and resources. Firstly we strategically help our clients align a solution that solves their business challenge. Secondly we configure the licensing options to those needs. Thirdly, as a hosting provider, we can offer consultation at the server layer to setup the Connect installation or go one step further and provide this as a managed solution. We want to make sure our clients get the most out of Adobe Connect, so as Adobe Authorised Training Partners we up skill our clients to both use and administer the system to it full. In many cases we also offer moderation services and refresher training for new recruits. Lastly, many clients want to integrate their Connect into their CRM, single sign on via User directories, or integration with telephony partners. We have a team that scopes and executes these integration projects. We work closely with PGi, Intercall and Arkadin in telephony integration. We work with Refined Data with many of their Adobe Connect extensions.
GP: Why Adobe Connect ?
LA: Good question, simple answer. We wanted to build our own web conferencing solution when the Flash media server came out. We went to do this and saw Macromedia breeze. We stopped the project as it just ticked all the boxes on customer experience, ease of use and, with Adobe behind it, knew it would be extended and enhanced in years to come. The Adobe Connect team has continually delivered on the upgrades and enhancements over the years while still providing a stable, secure, proven solution. We see it being used in all sectors in the market, especially in Education, government and enterprise. With all the deployment options such as SaaS, licensed and now the private cloud options, what else would one want.
Adobe Connect is a web conferencing platform, powering complete solutions for web meetings, eLearning, and webinars, on any device.