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?

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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?

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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?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 1)

This interview explores how enterprises are using composite mobile apps that bring various cloud and mobile services together on a device.

Sramana Mitra: Yaacov, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Harmon.ie.

Yaacov Cohen: Thank you for having me, Sramana. My name is Yaacov Cohen and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Harmon.ie. I am a global entrepreneur. I grew up in France but I lived 25 years in Israel and 5 years in Silicon Valley. Harmon.ie is an enterprise mobile vendor and our mission is to define the business consumer experience in the mobile enterprise. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do you foresee consumer smartphones using your technology or do you foresee handset vendors catering to the consumer market building your chips into the devices? Is that how you see the market evolving?

Gregg Smith: Certainly, that’s how we want to see the market evolve overtime. One thing that we were able to do because of Mr. Snowden and the press that he generated was do a lot of mainstream media. We did a lot of television in the USA today. One of the things that proves to me is that there are consumers interested in talking securely and text messaging securely. That’s an area we’ll start to concentrate on more in 2014.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you deploy in a Fortune 500, is the assumption that the phones or tables the Fortune 500 employees are using are owned by the corporation and they custom-build your chips and other applications on top of that into these devices?

Gregg Smith: It can work in a couple of different ways. Yes, they can absolutely leverage the chip and our applications and build applications on top of that. For example, Samsung has done that with us. In other cases, we might just provide the chip and the application. One of our partners would provide the chip and the application and they would just use standard off-the-shelf apps that we sell every day.
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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, one of the major trends that you’re tracking is government spying on corporate networks and you’re trying to provide a secure fortress around that?

Gregg Smith: That’s correct. We try to provide the best fortress we could build around all the communications I described earlier – sharing files, voice communications, and text communications.

Sramana Mitra: What other trends do you track or react to?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I guess the question that I’m asking you is somewhat broad. By saying that you deploy a secure mobile communication system, are you able to say that your customers are not being snooped on by the government? Are you able to say that the government cannot penetrate these systems?

Gregg Smith: In the security industry, you need to stay ahead of the hacking environment. You have to continually innovate to ensure that you’re providing the best security possible. While the threat level against the mobile ecosystem is very significant today and it’s no longer the kid in a dark bedroom, you’re looking at organized crime. You’re looking at friendly and foreign governments that are trying to listen in to your communications. From our standpoint, we need to continually innovate to stay ahead of that threat environment and that’s what we try to do every day.

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