GuideSpark: The Video Platform You Haven’t Met Yet

By Jim Lundy

GuideSpark is known for Employee Communications and Engagement via its cool videos that often show up during employee on-boarding or during benefits selection season. Our impression of what GuideSpark is really capable of changed after our attendance at their annual customer and analyst event. We left with the impression that GuideSpark has a complete Enterprise Video Platform.  This blog talks about GuideSpark and its role in Enterprise Video.

Dynamic Personalization

GuideSpark’s core offering is all about providing unique videos that help enterprises communicate knowledge to employees, particularly around hiring, on-boarding, training, company culture, and benefits selection. GuideSpark has been able to do this by successfully allowing videos to be created and personalized via what it refers to as Dynamic Personalization. That said, we think that there is more to the story.

Keith Kitani’s Background in Video

GuideSpark’s CEO Keith Kitani is no stranger to video. Keith spent time at Macromedia (which is now part of Adobe) and helped to pioneer the Breeze and Media Server product lines, which both had video at the core. Given Keith’s background and time he spent at Adobe, it was not a surprise to learn that Pritham Shetty also joined GuideSpark from Adobe, where he recently helped to develop the highly acclaimed Adobe Marketing Cloud.

GuideSpark Goes Beyond Employee Communications

In the briefing we received from the GuideSpark team, it became clear to me that the GuideSpark platform is really a video platform in disguise. Aragon has used the phrase “Video is the new Document.” What we mean by that is that video content will become as common as text content. One of the key aspects of video documents is that they are customizable. GuideSpark now offers this feature via packaged video solutions customized for clients. However, it is clear to us that GuideSpark can offer customized video solutions because its platform is designed to enable the creation of custom and dynamic videos, which can be targeted to specific audiences and workplace roles.

What all of this means is that GuideSpark is much more than Employee Communications; it is really an Enterprise Video Platform. This has implications for both GuideSpark and the overall industry. Today, GuideSpark mainly sells specific solutions – which includes video content that runs on the GuidesSpark platform. Given what we saw, our take is that many enterprises would be interested in licensing the platform itself to create, manage, and deliver their own unique videos.