Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about the other different use cases that you’re seeing for the solution you’re offering. You took off through the investment banking use case. Are we talking more of a sales kind of scenario? Do you want people who are in sales situations to have access to their colleagues and information to interact with clients?

Yaacov Cohen: Yes, definitely sales is a very important scenario as sales people are very mobile and they need to have easy and safe access to information from their mobile devices. It’s really a challenge today to have a combination of safe and easy. Typically, there is a big trade-off between the two. Also, it’s not limited to banking. For example, we have customers in the construction industry. One of them is the Department of Transportation of Missouri. They are actually helping in controlling the building of bridge and working with contractors to build highways. They work together with the contractor and to monitor the progress of the building. They also need to have easy access to maps, construction designs, and plans. They also want to do it using 3G or 4G network from a mobile device, primarily from a tablet. The iPad is definitely the predominant tablet. That is also a scenario where it’s crucial for them to have an easy way to access information.

It’s not only about accessing information. It can be to update this information. They want to be able to interact with experts who are at the back office using a social network. Today, in all industries, the notion of an office is becoming more and more elusive. We are working pretty much from any place. I see people working from coffee shops, on the field, or at the customer site. Companies may have a hub where everybody’s coming to but less and less people are going everyday and work from a desktop. Definitely, there is a need to enable and free the information worker from the ties to a desk.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely, there is no question about the multiple device mobility trend. I’d like to go a little bit to the use case question. You’ve talked about sales as a major use case. I suppose there are certain kinds of industries where technical support is a big use case. What other major use cases are you selling into? Not just the broad trend but use cases where you are seeing adoption of your technology.

Yaacov Cohen: We have a number of insurance companies such as Aon that process claims. They also need to manage re-quotes. Now, people are trying to build this knowledge center. They want to make it very easy to discover documents either because they want to find a re-quote for litigation or they want to be able to find knowledge. More and more information is now being used to produce knowledge. It’s actually a different level in terms of organizing information. You can have a document graveyard. That’s not a knowledge center. It’s one thing to be storing documents in a cloud service such as Dropbox. It’s a different thing to be using tags and metadata to enable discovery.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie
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