Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 7)

Sramana MItra: The healthcare industry has been the most active in the history of the healthcare IT industry. It’s really moving and active right now. I anticipate that, within the next decade, the healthcare IT penetration is going to be humongous. There’s going to be huge changes.

Tom Hogan: I agree. I have a theory for why it’s going to happen for the next 10 years. Do you have a theory for why it’s finally kicking in?

Sramana Mitra: It got kicked off by the stimulus to begin with. Now the stimulus is actually going to end, but the momentum has already picked up. I think the stimulus is no longer necessary. It’s the same thing—consumerization of IT. The industry is facing a huge consumerization of their customer base so they have to play along and stay in tune.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That is actually a segue into the kinds of opportunities out there that are open problems. It’s one thing for corporations to try to innovate and come up with new ideas and processes using all these technologies. It’s also that same activity and ideation process that is going on the entrepreneur side. I think people are thinking about how to take advantage of those kinds of capabilities as it pertains to enterprise mobility. Have you seen anything really compelling in that field?

Tom Hogan: There are ideas and approaches that we see everyday that you scratch your head and say, “I would have never thought of that.” In terms of big productized offerings versus use case ideas, I think it’s still early innings. In terms of opportunities at the entrepreneur level, I would think the best opportunities would come from use case ideas. The abused example is Uber. The reason everybody uses them is because it’s so pervasive. Who would have thought, even four years ago, that somebody was going to create a $40 billion business.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a $40 million market cap driven by very artificial valuation drivers.
>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 5)

Tom Hogan: I was with our clients last week and have had multiple conversations like this in the last two months where they’re waking up and saying, “I better go figure this out. Forget about how to do it. First, we’ve got to figure out what we need to deliver and enable before we figure out how we do it.” We’re convening 50 of our top leaders tomorrow for two days. We’re just going to brainstorm and ideate on what we can and should do with mobile to transform our businesses because we don’t know.

Sramana Mitra: I think there are two categories of applications though. There are some that are actually re-engineering existing business processes to go mobile. Then there is this new category of applications that are possible because of the geo-location services available on the mobile. What kinds of capabilities does that offer as it pertains to a particular business? That requires original thinking and fresh approaches.

Tom Hogan: I think that’s right. In the former case, which is less difficult to get your head around, there’s still some subtle differences. I’ll give you the simplest example. I’ve got a CRM system or a general ledger HR system and I want to be able to render it on a mobile device. That’s fine >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 4)

Tom Hogan: If you do a click-down into the platform side, it’s okay for people to come to that realization of who’s out there and who do you compete with. You’ve asked about the Apple and IBM partnership. I’ll say a couple of things. The positive is the move that they made is a pretty powerful validation of how strategic and important true mobile apps in the enterprise is becoming. It’s great validation for the space. Point two is Apple is an important part of our ecosystem for all of the obvious reasons. They’re not a competitor. They are also a major catalyst or stimulus for our business. We have and we’ll continue to embrace everything Apple is doing.

As it relates to the competitive side and partnerships, our belief is that the old days of get-it-all-from-me and the exclusive nature of the positioning of that partnership is not what the market wants. The market wants heterogeneity and not be locked into an IBM–Apple only ecosystem. The good news is they’re going to give us validation but when I go to a customer executive and say, “Do you really want to be locked >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you help me formulate an ecosystem map for your enterprise mobility sector as you see it? Who are the players? Who are the competitors? Who are the partners? Who’s doing what and also, what are the trends in that general space?

I’ll kick it off with one major observation, which is the partnership between Apple and IBM  that they have announced recently. They have also announced a portfolio of enterprise mobility applications. It seems to be a very big push from IBM into this market in partnership with Apple for the iPad. There’s clearly a trend that is developing there.

Tom Hogan: Great questions and you’ve got a couple of threads in there. Let me just talk about competition in the broad landscape and I’ll specifically address the partnership between Apple and IBM. Who is the competition? I would actually tell you, and I think you’d get validation >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is your solution suite? Do you have a platform, and then you deliver applications on top of that? How do you bring your product to market?

Tom Hogan: That’s a great question. We have three paths. I’m going to share the three with you in the reverse order of a conversation I might have with a prospect or a potential client. First is, the history of the company was to assemble the broadest and the best SDLC that’s concentrated on mobile. That really has four blocks, if you will, that you can think of in chronological sequence.

Block A is to help you rapidly design the best system of engagement possible in the market. Now that you’ve designed it, you’ve got to >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony (Part 1)

Enterprise Mobility is a major trend. Here, we catch up with Tom Hogan, CEO of Kony, a leader in the space.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about yourself as well as Kony.

Tom Hogan: I’ll be brief with myself. I’ve been in the industry for 33 years in all. This is the smallest organization I’ve been associated with, but arguably the most exciting from a growth and potential relevance to change the landscape of the industry. I’ve spent a little over 17 years at IBM. That was my first job out of college. I spent some time at Siebel Systems in the heyday of CRM and had the opportunity to be the CEO of Vignette, which back in the late 90s was the global leader in the whole movement from classic brick-and-mortar to the Internet. Then I spent five >>>

Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in the strategic story?

Robert Reffkin: While searching for the most valuable products and services to this business, we surveyed our clients and asked them what they cared most about. They cared most about helping them answer questions like what’s the right price for a home and how do you find a buyer. Our focus is on creating technology around the research on valuation tools to help our agents advise on prices. Then we identified a bunch of digital and non-digital exposure strategies to make sure that sellers are in front of all the right eyeballs as much as possible.

Initially, it was more around building a mobile app. As we progressed, it was becoming around saving time for agents and building valuation tools so that they can be better advisors. From a strategy perspective, I think it’s very easy when you’re young to not know exactly what >>>