Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What levels are we talking? Are we seeing this more in technical recruitment or are we seeing this more on junior recruitment? Where is your product and is your process being applied more readily?

Kurt Heikkinen: It has evolved nicely over the last several years to be able to support the enterprise of hiring. The way we’re able to achieve that is through the configurability of our applications. Apart from on-demand video, we also offer up on-demand voice, live video, and live voice.

What we know is that the recruiting challenges are very different on a position-by-position basis. How you might want to recruit an executive or an engineer are very different from recruiting for a high-volume hourly position where maybe you’re staffing a call centre or a retail store. That’s where our solutions allow the client to apply the specific application and workflow to the specific use case. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The topic is of huge interest to me. I’ve actually written about this quite a lot. I’m thrilled that our paths crossed and we are able to discuss this topic at length. Let me start by peeling the onion a little bit for our audience to understand what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for. Where do you position your company’s offering?

If you’re talking about medical training, the assumption is that doctors are going to go to medical school and get trained. It’s a very lengthy process. It’s an expensive process. Obviously, it’s hard to train millions of doctors in full-fledged medical schools. Are you, somehow, addressing that issue?

Norm Wu: We’re doing a number of things. What we do at medical schools may be slightly different from what we do with nurse practitioner schools. Let me first talk about medical schools. In the US, the capacity in medical schools is not growing very quickly. That’s because there are limited residency slots. Schools that try to increase their capacity will have trouble matching their graduates into residency programs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What category of customers are going after? Large enterprises, mid-sized, small businesses? Where is the business focused?

Ali Din: To be candid, we have tried a lot of different sizes and target markets. In the early years, we pivoted quite a bit. At this point, our sweet spot is what I would call the lower mid-market. That’s companies that typically have 200 to 500 employees. We continue to do business with organisations that are smaller and then we also do quite a bit of business with very large organisations that have tens of thousands of users or have a global footprint as well.

Our go-to market approach is, we actually go through the channel. We built partnerships with Ingram Micro. We also have been working with Tech Data. We also work with the world’s largest reseller CDW, which is based out of Illinois. Those are just a couple of examples of channel partners but we go through a channel ecosystem where they have that close relationship with the end customer and we help enable that by providing the cloud service. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I have a question just based on what you described so far. There is a thought that is coming to my mind that I’d like to get clarified. Does that mean that, in using this kind of remote interviewing technology that you have empowered Disney to use, it opened up a much broader segment of remote candidates whom they finished interviewing in this mode and could move them to Los Angeles or wherever they want them to be located. Is that one of the ways that the process is impacted?

Kurt Heikkinen: That’s exactly right. If you think about the traditional recruiting process, you have recruiters who try to find candidates. They, traditionally, might post a job on a job board or post it on LinkedIn to try and find that talent, but the process is not very candidate-friendly today because the traditional job descriptions are in the written form and there is very little insight in terms of the job opportunity. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 1)

There’s a significant trend in the cloud services space towards managed services. Read on to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as dinCloud.

Ali Din: I run a company by the name of dinCloud, which is a cloud services provider. I’ve been in the IT channel or IT industry for just shy of 20 years now. I’ve been in implementation roles, product development, marketing, brand management, and am now overseeing dinCloud. The company has been incubated out of an IT value-added reseller that was close to about $1 billion in revenue.

The founder of dinCloud had also founded that reseller, so he had been in the industry for a number of years as well. We initially started out as a desktop-as-a-service provider because there were a lot of opportunities around taking the physical desktop and the evolution of that into a virtual mode. We were already seeing this happen in the server space around 2010 and 2011. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent (Part 1)

The recruiting approach in large companies that hire large numbers in a given year is changing. Read on, to learn how cloud and video are becoming central to the current trends.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Montage.

Kurt Heikkinen: I’m the President and CEO of Montage. Personally, I have a few decades of experience in innovation inside of human capital management. Our company Montage is a leading provider of purpose-built video and voice interviewing technology that transforms the hiring process. We work with many large organizations to help them gain a hiring advantage using our solutions that are specifically tailored to support the complex requirements of recruiting and hiring. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 5)

Amir Husain: Within our own area of cyber security, one of the things that’s happening at the large-scale level is that cyber security is being weaponized. This is very sad but it’s true. Cyber security is now becoming a weapon of warfare. You’ve seen where digital weaponry was used to rollback the Iranian nuclear program by almost two years. In that two-year period, space was created for a negotiated diplomatic solution to a crisis which, otherwise, would have resulted in a shooting war. God knows how many unknown examples that are not in the public domain exist.

Lately, there has also been an attack on the Ukrainian power grid. At the end of the day, nobody disputes the fact that that was a cyber attack. It brought 200,000 individuals off the power grid. These are large-scale attacks now and this is happening in the real world. The consequences and chances of digital threat resulting in actual physical damage are increasing.

They’re also becoming much more diverse. There’s already 500,000 cars in the US that could be remotely hacked. As they’re going down the highway at 70 miles an hour, you can call them to turn left or right. With self-driving cars, that will be taken to a whole different level. As this burgeoning industrial Internet >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Greenwave Systems CEO Martin Manniche (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about the specifics of Greenwave. Where are you doing this company from? Where are you based? What are the specifics of the company?

Martin Manniche: We started the company up front. We saw that there was a need for us to innovate in a different way and build this big managed services platform. We like to say that we are headquartered in one location, but we really see ourselves as a company with diversity and focused on being a global company. As I said, we are US-headquartered out of Irvine, California. We are European-headquartered at Copenhagen.

We are, today, around 250 employees worldwide. We have, over the last three years, doubled revenues year over year. We are very profitable. We have seen massive growth within the last three years. The company is seven years old but the first four years was hard. We grew but we didn’t grow the pace we’ve done over the last three years. >>>