Userful - Best Platform as a Service

Company: Userful, San Ramon, CA
Company Description: Userful’s Visual Networking Platform empowers enterprise IT teams to centrally manage AV applications and services over the network—from control rooms to digital signage, corporate communications and retail. By leveraging network infrastructure, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and using only a commercially available PC or server, Userful delivers high performance, reliability and security.
Nomination Category: Product & Service Categories - Business Technology Solutions
Nomination Sub Category: Platform as a Service

Nomination Title: Userful's Visual Networking Platform

If this is a brand-new product, state the date on which it was released. If this is a new version of an existing product, state the date on which the update was released:

It is an upgrade to the Userful Visual Networking Platform, launched on February 2nd, 2021, now running on Userful’s new Chronos video engine.

The Userful Visual Networking Platform is a software-defined modernized service delivery platform that enables teams to deliver any visual application they might need dynamically, flexibly and nimbly. Userful’s platform delivers any data or content source to any screen or even any part of a screen anywhere in the world in real time—including individual displays, video walls and kiosks in offices; employees and customers’ desktops, and even to screens in people’s pockets—extending the reach of the platform and ensuring hyper-scalability for any applications deployed on it. Userful does all this with a hybrid solution for on-premise, data-centre or cloud architectures, harnessing commercially available off-the-shelf server hardware.

The Visual Networking Platform has the compute power to manage video processing at scale. The software gives users the ability to administer sources and direct the right visual information to the right audiences at the right time. It supports the mapping of endpoints to displays, is entirely network enabled, includes role-based access control, API for interconnect global management via cloud enabled tools, with virtualization of servers to enable the most flexible global deployment options and to support a workflow approach to visualization.

It improves usability of the solution for IT teams, because it leverages existing IT standards for network and computing technology, while allowing integration to the existing IT infrastructure.

Manageability of the platform is done centrally through a web-based interface, which can be accessed from anywhere in the world, allowing IT staff to centrally manage all their display infrastructure around the world from the HQ.

New capabilities have been added to the platform to extend its support for the enterprise IT, including: secured streaming (to enable operations to securely deliver critical operating information to branch/satellite facilities, remote workers, and anywhere that large distributed organizations need; native platform monitoring tools (to evaluate the system and network performance); native Zoom integration (currently in Beta) and a web app offering for enterprise streaming solutions to deliver operational information to any screen, including mobile devices, and allowing users to customize and personalize their experience, in order to maximize productivity.

The initial sales of our product grew over 100 per cent last year on the back of our first platform. With this new update, as of May 31, 2021 for fiscal year (October 2020 to May 2021) our sales have reached $5,305,482 compared to $4,157,307 (October 2019 to May 2020) and we're anticipating 200 per cent growth or more in the year ahead.

In the past year, more and more enterprise organizations worldwide have been adopting the Userful Visual Networking Platform—including Papa John’s, Suffolk, Deloitte, SAP in Europe, Skoda / VW in India, Banco Santander and BBVA in Spain, Texas A&M, AT&T, and more. Based on the combination of both new customer, and also customers discovering that they can expand the ways that they're using this platform to new service offerings and more compute intensive video applications, we anticipate a 200 per cent growth (both on unit volume and bookings), which would amplify our ARR significantly (about 109-110 per cent).

Over the past year, we have received the G2 Leader and High Performer Badge Awards for fall,winter, spring and summer, respectively. G2 is the world’s largest tech marketplace where businesses can discover, review, and manage the technology they need to reach their potential.

Customer success/testimonials: https: //userful.com/about/customer-success
Customer case studies: https: //userful.com/case-studies
Link to C&C demo: https: //demo.userful.com/ucc/control/