Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a cloud services business model?

Yaacov Cohen: We are running as a mobile application on iOs, Androids, Blackberries, as well as desktops and laptops. We have multiple delivery models on mobile, cloud, and desktop. We’re trying to deliver this business consumer experience across all platforms. One of the big things is that we are delivering this one-screen experience across all devices.

Sramana Mitra: You have some sort of consolidated composite application layer that you have configured that you feed into multiple device form factors from that composite front-end?

Yaacov Cohen: Yes, that’s a good analysis. With earlier technology, you would do with system integrators. Today, every cloud service such as Yammer, Office 365, Box, and Salesforce are exposing web services. We are taking advantage of these web services and defining a user layer. We’re abstracting between the application and service level that the cloud is providing. By building this abstraction layer, we’re able to build a user interface and a consumer experience for multiple services. Until now, you had a one-to-one relationship between the cloud service and the mobile application. We are changing this concept to multiple-to-one. We have multiple cloud services displayed in a single application. That’s a total revolution in terms of user experience because the application concept is dead.

This notion of mobile application – we’re getting so many of them and they’re all single purpose. This is causing a constant context switch. We are poking our phones and tablets switching from one app to another, losing context. This is totally counter-productive. When you want to promote productivity and collaboration, you need an experience which is a lot more fluid and less scattered. That’s what we can do with this concept of aggregating multiple cloud services in a single application.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. How big are you, revenue wise?

Yaacov Cohen: We cost actually $11 million in 2013.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? What are you doing to do to grow from here on?

Yaacov Cohen: Actually, we’re just in the middle of a major capital raise. We are looking for $50 million to move to the next step. Our goal is to become a leader in the enterprise mobility world to deliver this mobile collaboration and this one-screen user experience.

Sramana Mitra: Now I’m going to ask you to think about trends for the industry in general. Based on all this experience you have on working deeply with hundreds of customers, tell me what are the major trends that you are monitoring. What are some of the open opportunities out there? Things that are not being addressed currently and things that you are not planning to address but are out there and need to be addressed.

Yaacov Cohen: That is a great question. Overall, the sole trend of mobility is huge. It is really reshaping the whole industry. The combination of mobile devices with cloud services is opening up a lot of opportunities. We have seed BYOD where people now are bringing their own devices, which is creating a lot of challenges for IT. I think it’s redefining the role of IT from as a gate keeper. IT can’t be a gate keeper anymore. People are not only bringing their own devices; they’re bringing their own tools, applications, and expectations. People now are consumers and they need to be served by IT rather than monitored and controlled. IT is totally changing dramatically.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie
1 2 3 4 5 6