The Challenge
When you operate at Vevo's scale, the office is part of how the work gets made. The company built its reputation as the world's leading music video network, delivering more than 22 billion views and 1.5 billion hours of music video every month from a catalog of over a million videos, and running the largest network of music channels on YouTube. It does this with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and Sydney and dedicated content studios in Brooklyn and the LA Arts District. Vevo runs a hybrid model with a three-day in-office requirement and around 200 employees at its New York headquarters alone. The entire global footprint is supported by a remarkably lean IT team of three, led by Stephen Bruno, SVP of IT Strategy and Operations.
A company that invests this seriously in its real estate expects its teams to use it. But for a long time, Vevo simply could not see whether they did. Card key data at the headquarters was unreliable, because people arrive in groups, one person swipes, and everyone walks in. Smaller offices had no reporting at all, and the studios ran on lock and key. "Before? It was all guessing," Stephen recalls. Getting any picture of attendance meant reaching out to people at each location and asking them to estimate.
The one structured process that existed, pulling card swipe data into a spreadsheet for leadership, covered only the New York HQ and consumed several hours of IT time every month. And Stephen had already been down this road. A network-based presence feature from an established US provider turned out buggy, with support that was hard to reach. Another vendor he evaluated had no real product in the space. Vevo needed precise, network-based attendance data across every location, without adding hardware and without adding headcount.
Why PULT
How Stephen found PULT says a lot about how the best IT leaders evaluate software today: he asked ChatGPT. PULT came up, he checked the website, and reached out. From the first conversations with founder Julius and the engineering team, three things made PULT the clear and confident choice.
First, day-one support for the systems that actually matter. Vevo's three most critical technologies, Meraki, Jamf, and BambooHR, were fully supported out of the box, alongside Slack. For a cloud-first company, that was the dealmaker, and no competitor matched it as cleanly.
Second, a direct line to the people building the product. The initial release covered around 70% of what Vevo needed, but PULT made a concrete roadmap commitment to build out the presence reporting, and then delivered on it. "Once I understood what the roadmap for the product was, I didn't have many concerns," Stephen says.
Third, accuracy that can't be gamed. Network-based detection captures attendance even at studios with no card key system at all, and unlike a badge that a whole group can walk in behind, a laptop on the network tells the truth.
PULT in Action
Today, PULT Presence runs across all seven Vevo locations, offices and studios alike. Presence is detected passively through the existing Meraki network and Jamf-managed devices, with no sensors, no badges, and no new hardware to deploy or maintain. For the share of the workforce on PCs without MDM coverage, PULT's engineering team built a custom solution that captures those devices by MAC address through Slack, so not a single location falls out of the picture.
The BambooHR integration is what makes the data not just accurate but fair. Vacation and sick days flow straight into attendance averages, so an employee who was out for two weeks is never wrongly flagged as non-compliant when they were in fact meeting the three-day policy. Remote weeks are next on Vevo's roadmap. All of it lands in a single dashboard that senior leadership and HR open directly, managing their own teams' compliance instead of funneling every request through IT.
The setup itself was almost anticlimactic, in the best way. It took a few hours, and the system was already pulling data. Ongoing maintenance is close to nothing, an occasional check, roughly once a month, to keep device records in sync after a hardware swap.
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The Results
- One source of truth for 7 locations. Attendance and three-day-policy compliance are now visible per office and per department in a single dashboard, including studios that previously had no reporting whatsoever.
- A measurable increase in office participation after rollout, which Stephen estimates at around 10%, once it was clear that attendance was being measured.
- Manual reporting eliminated, ~5 hours/month saved. The old spreadsheet process only ever covered the New York HQ; today all 7 locations are captured automatically, and the answer to "who's in the office?" takes seconds, straight from the app.
- Reliable attendance data Vevo can trust. Network-based detection replaced guesswork, card swipes, and the old "eye test" with accurate, automatically captured data that leadership relies on every day.
- Accountability distributed. Senior leadership and HR pull reporting directly, freeing the IT team from being the bottleneck for every workplace question.
- Smarter operations. The facilities team plans catered lunches and events from real historical attendance per weekday, rather than guessing.
- Real estate decisions backed by data, with presence data now informing whether Vevo's footprint matches actual usage and where hoteling could fit.
- Engineering that moves with you, building fixes whenever an issue arose, including the bespoke PC capture solution, so the product keeps fitting Vevo rather than the other way around.
- A genuine set-it-and-forget-it solution, with maintenance so light that a three-person IT team runs it across a global footprint without breaking stride.
"Anytime we ran into an issue, the engineering team just built a fix. They always built a fix for us."
Stephen Bruno, SVP IT Strategy & Operations, Vevo
Ready for similar results?
Curious how this would look for your team?
Vevo brought its entire global footprint into focus with a team of three, no new hardware, and no manual reporting. If you want the same clarity on office attendance, we're happy to show you how PULT Presence fits your setup.
