Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 2)

Avinoam Nowogrodski: What we have created in Clarizen is collaboration in context. It’s in context of getting work done and promoting work. If I would just use another term, which is a bit more complex because I come from the area of product lifecycle management, it’s all about the work-life cycle management collaboration. You need to collaborate in context of work-life cycle and not just collaboration for the sake of collaboration. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 1)

Let’s take a look at the future of cloud-based collaboration with Avi Nowogrodski.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some of your background as well as introducing Clarizen to our audience.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: I’m actually a second-timer. The first company I built in 1996 was a company named SmarTeam. It dealt with collaboration for bill of materials. I was the CEO of this company for 10 years. I sold it to Dassault Systems after three years of inception.

>>>

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.

>>>

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.
>>>

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?

>>>

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.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to start a company today, what would you do in this area?

Sameer Patel: There are several network-first business models waiting to disrupt some highly transactive areas inside organizations that should never have been transaction-first.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What I was trying to get to was the whole enterprise social network. The impact of social sharing behavior inside the enterprise is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s probably five years old, right?

Sameer Patel: It’s actually 2006, so seven years.

Sramana Mitra: Maybe seven years for the early adopters but five years after coming into the mainstream. Now we are coming to a point where, continually, there are actual metrics available on what kind of real ROI impact we are seeing. I remember I started covering the cloud computing trend a long time ago and then we started seeing actual metrics around 2009 when the companies were able to hard-core quantify what was the impact of Cloud Computing on enterprises. I was getting numbers from Intel and CIL which were really hard-core numbers. The question I was asking is where are we in that evolution?

>>>