Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Cooper, CIO of ServicePower (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on that? Can you use an example to explain what you’re talking about?

Simon Cooper: If you take a large retailer, for example, they may be using SAP as their primary system. Then, when they source work out to third-parties and they want to get data back in a timely fashion, there’s a mixture of third-party software that they use. They might just be using QuickBooks application or another might be using some of the SMB software that’s specifically designed for saving appliance space. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Cooper, CIO of ServicePower (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about two or three customers and really double-click down into how they’re using your product.

Simon Cooper: If we look at the US, we have a Tier One retailer that uses the application. They have quite a substantial field service workforce that is out on the road every day. They use the scheduling tool, GPS tracking tool, and business intelligence tool to manage that workforce. They also use our third-party tool to place work into and extract out of that third-party space. They can act both as a job provider and a service provider, on both sides of that equation. That allows them to basically manage their workload. They can obviously fill-up less staff with the work they’re receiving directly.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Cooper, CIO of ServicePower (Part 1)

The field service industry is heavily impacted by cloud computing. Here’s a short conversation with one of the players.

Sramana Mitra: Simon, let’s introduce our audience to you as well as to ServicePower.

Simon Cooper: My name is Simon Cooper. I’m the CIO of ServicePower. ServicePower has been in the field service management space since the early ‘90s. Originally, we were funded from a research project in Europe as part of ICL Fujitsu to develop artificial intelligence-based algorithms to solve complex scheduling problems. From there, we’ve evolved into a field service management leader. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There’s one article called “Innovation’s Next Decade” which you will find interesting. That article will probably address the kind of things that you’re talking about.

Yaacov Cohen: I believe also in the convergence of ethics and technology. Spirituality and technology needs to be better converged. Technology won’t free humanity.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmon.ie (Part 5)

Yaacov Cohen: The enterprise is a lot more heterogeneous. It used to be controlled by three to five vendors. It’s a lot more diverse, because I can have a cloud service for pretty much anything in the enterprise. I think the mega trend here is enterprise mobility and it includes cloud services, BYOD, devices, and security. I think that’s the landscape. >>>

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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