Strong brands put presentations in the Cloud with Audience

Online presentation tools are becoming increasingly familiar, because of the co-creation or the strong visual effects they allow. Audience, a Belgian tool, chooses to put presentations in the Cloud for brand-sensitive companies that want to exert strong control over their visual identity, like e.g. Rabobank, Unique and Nespresso Business Solutions. A nifty plus are the detailed price simulations or real-time stock levels within the presentations. And Combell provides flawless availability.

Did you recently have your boat rocked so badly by a presentation that was so flashy it made you seasick? Chances are you were faced with the results of presentation tools like Prezi. The Belgian online presentation tool Audience mostly focuses on control, interactivity and measurability.

Organisations that take care of their brand or visual identity in a strict manner – like Rabobank, Unique, Nespresso Business Solutions and Geodis Wilson (TNT) – find in Audience an online platform to monitor their own company style, while end-users apply selective changes. “Everything is adapted centrally, like you would with a content management system (CMS) for a website, but very specifically aimed at presentations”, says Tom Lauwerys, CEO of Verso, the company that develops Audience.

Central management, mobile presentation

“Marketing monitors the brand and manages the visual identity. Sales always has to have the most recent data at its disposal and does not want to spend too much time processing content”, Tom Lauwerys continues. “With the approach Audience follows, you are always true to your brand and the end-user only has to make minor changes.”

Audience’s real strength lies with the integration of interactive functions, directly into the presentation. “You can integrate almost anything – from real-time stock management to a service finder or all kinds of price calculations and interactive forms – just like you would find on an interactive website. This lifts interaction to a higher level during corporate presentations.”

Afterwards, you also know exactly which audience you have reached. “The advantage of a presentation platform in the Cloud is that you can perfectly follow who viewed the slides and with which medium.”

“Nowadays, cloud computing is well-accepted in large organisations. You control Audience via a browser or app, without having to think about ICT. Supporting services like Combell’s are so outstanding that our customers can completely rely on them for their availability and speed. Although we do not recommend it, you can even present via mobile Internet with simulations and real-time calculations.”

Focus on the future with managed hosting

Audience has been working with Combell since 2013. “We came from a co-location service, for which we had invested in servers ourselves. In the end, this proved to be very expensive because we had to regularly upgrade the hardware and the software licenses. If you also added the real cost of our ICT manager who had to keep everything up-to-date and secure, Combell’s offer was much cheaper. They bring professionalism and excellent infrastructure to the table. For this, we now have one single point of contact, so that we only have to manage our application and are free to fully focus on our core business. To us, it is important to be able to maximally focus our internal ICT knowledge on the future of Audience.”

“Combell enjoys an excellent reputation in the market. If something happens, I’m notified or I immediately get someone on the phone. Incidents are few. The way they are handled shows that Combell is very well organised. And when Audience will start to grow massively, our infrastructure will be ready for it.”