SMPAV – Vantage Venues

Virtual Events Branding

The virtual events world is constantly evolving at an ever-increasing pace. New technologies and solutions seem to be cropping up weekly, with literally an abundance of platforms and technologies all looking to get a piece of the proverbial “virtual pie”.

 

We partnered with Zoom back in mid-2019 when they were still new on the video conferencing scene and today, they have become an eponym. As an early adopter, I remember being ecstatic about what this new contender was doing back in 2016. Eric Yuan (founder) left Cisco with 40 of their top engineers, with a revolutionary vision of making video conferencing easy for everyone. You wouldn’t need to have to have a degree in IT to make it happen and it was accessible to everyone with an internet connection and an email address.

 

Fast forward to Apr 2020 and Zoom becomes part of the vocabulary in all languages across the globe. With that instant rise to fame and popularity, security issues are inevitable. That is something that every IT vendor dreads, as security and risk assessment is part of the daily vocabular. As a result of these unexpected security challenges that Zoom ran into, some large institutions have decided to ban the platform outright. In my humble opinion, being in IT for over 20 years, I feel that it was a knee jerk reaction, but I do realize large corporations have different IT regulations than some smaller environments. Needles to say, it was incredible how quickly Zoom reacted to implement drastic changes.

 

But I digress, history is behind us and this is not a plug (excuse the pun) for Zoom. As an event company, we need to figure out the best innovations to stay ahead of the game. How do we do this? Well, just like everyone else, we’ve been using Zoom, Teams, WebEx, Hopin and Intellum, just to name a few over the last few months with varying degree of success. Each platform has pros and cons, as they will continue to evolve while striving for the perfect software / solution. The only way one could achieve something close to perfection is adopting pros from each platform and attempt to merge them under one roof. As the ultimate provider to the customer, this is what we set out to accomplish – connectivity between multiple platforms, custom branding of streams as well as restarting our own internal platform efforts. The possibilities, and options, are endless.

Scroll to Top