Altus, which offers a cloud-based video hosting solution that focuses on training enterprise sales forces, just announced the release of its new and improved video platform. Altus can work with any video, no matter whether its a teleconference, WebEx meeting, internal meeting, or a video of a corporate event. Besides making these videos available on a customizable portal, the company also transcribes them and makes them searchable.
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The company, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley, currently works with a number of large enterprise clients, including Cisco, General Motors, Chevron, and IBM. In these companies, Altus' solution is being used by over 75,000 sales people.
Video Training
We spoke to Altus' Mark Pollard and Tim Hughan last week about this new release and they both stressed how important these video solutions have become for large enterprises as they are cutting back on travel and event costs while also trying to achieve higher revenues per salesperson at the same time. The Altus team also pointed out that poor preparation is one of the most important reasons why potential deals are often lost. According to a recent IDC survey, 57% of sales people were rated not or somewhat prepared for their meetings.
This is where Altus' solution comes into play. Altus can deliver video in any format required, including video for the iPhone, MP3s without the video, or just the text file of the transcript. Users can also choose to receive new content by RSS.
Video Transcripts
The transcripts make it easy to find data in these rich-media presentations and videos that would otherwise be lost. These high-quality transcripts, however, which are done by hand, also slow the process down and it generally takes a day or two before the transcript is available. Then, however, the transcript and video run side by side and the transcripts and slides auto-advance in sync with the video.
Altus also puts a special focus on PowerPoint presentations which can run next to the video and transcripts. Most importantly, Altus also builds a company-wide repository of available presentations and allows its users to mix and match these presentations to quickly build new presentations as necessary.
Besides the video solution, Altus also offers a number of other features on its portal, including blogs and some basic social networking features.
In this new version, vSearch is now also compatible with all the major browsers, including IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
