Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 3)

Yaacov Cohen: Let’s say, if I want to look for a specific life insurance policy. I want to see who among my colleagues have been able to tailor an insurance portfolio to a specific scenario. I want to be able to use tags which are describing the specific scenario to search across a million documents and to retrieve the five documents which are relevant to me for this particular insurance situation. That’s the type of scenario that we see where you need to build a knowledge center rather than simply store a document.

Sramana Mitra: What does your competitive landscape look like? Whom do you consider as direct and indirect competitors?

Yaacov Cohen: We have been identified as one of the emerging leaders in the new space – enterprise mobile collaboration. I think it’s a very dynamic and new space where it’s still not totally clear who are the competitors. There is a company called WatchDoc that is trying to provide easy access to documents and social networks. You could say that they are competitors. Dropbox used to be consumer only and now they want to get into the enterprise. So they may become a competitor. Then, you’ve companies like MobileIron, AirWatch, which have been providing mobile security. Actually, to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack, they’re starting to get into mobile collaboration. We’re partnering with these people. At the same time, there is a little bit of competition going on because they have entry-level offerings in the mobile collaboration space.

Sramana Mitra: What about Huddle? Do you consider Huddle a competitor?

Yaacov Cohen: Yes. I heard their name but I’m not totally familiar with them. I think they are also providing cloud-based document collaboration. I don’t see them in customer situations yet.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your company. You’re based in Israel, yes?

Yaacov Cohen: We are an Israeli global company. Our product center is in Israel. We have sales and marketing offices in Boston and London. They our two major hubs. We have about 65 employees worldwide. We are also, from a cultural standpoint, a social company. Everybody’s talking to everybody. For example, all the internal documents are being shared across sales, marketing, and engineering people. Everybody is a co-CEO in the company. That’s the way I look at it. Everybody has a clear role and clear ownership and is responsible and accountable to make decisions.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture funded company?

Yaacov Cohen: It’s a bootstrapped company. The company was Mainsoft until 2008. In 2008, we decided to thoroughly switch gears. We looked at enterprise collaboration as a huge emerging space. Together with one of the engineers in the company who had some great ideas, we decided to completely restart the company. We brought in a little investment to get started. We have been self-sufficient since 2008 with minimum cash injections. We restarted the company from that point and changed the name to Harmon.ie.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have?

Yaacov Cohen: We have 600 enterprise customers. Of which, 100 are bringing at least $11,000 per year and 50 are bringing an average of $150,000 per year. We have 600 customers but the most important are these 150.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie
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