Now Facilitating Enterprise Collaboration for Nearly 400,000 End Users

Milpitas, CA.– Social email software provider harmon.ie® today announced major year-to-date sales and operations growth, reflecting rising recognition of the value of its social email platform for promoting end user adoption of critical business collaboration tools such as Microsoft® SharePoint® and Google Docs. Milestones included a 180 percent year-over-year increase in sales, including 36 new enterprise customers with more than 88,500 end users worldwide, as well as the appointment of the company’s first general managers in North America and Europe.

 

“Collaboration tools like SharePoint are designed to facilitate efficient document management, team editing and version control as well as improving team productivity in other ways, but 66% of end users refuse to use SharePoint for basic tasks like daily document exchange,” said Yaacov Cohen, co-founder and CEO of harmon.ie. “Our strong growth is the direct result of the ability of our social email software to bring SharePoint collaboration and social functionalities into the email client, eliminating people’s resistance to adopting new tools and enabling enterprises to take full advantage of their collaboration investments.”

harmon.ie’s social email software aggregates collaboration and social tools from vendors like Microsoft and Google within the email interface, overcoming workers’ resistance to adopting these platforms by eliminating the need to change work habits and constantly switch windows. harmon.ie for SharePoint, for example, provides SharePoint document collaboration and social features within a Microsoft Outlook® or Lotus Notes® sidebar that avoids SharePoint navigation through at least nine windows for each task.

This speed and ease of use have increased SharePoint usage in enterprise environments from an average of 30 percent before harmon.ie deployment to as high as 80 percent in just a few months. Key benefits include the ability to share and retrieve documents from a central location within the email client instead of searching email attachments and other local, corporate and cloud repositories. These searches waste an average 16 days a year per user, according to a recent industry survey.

EXPANDED GLOBAL PRESENCE

To support expanded growth initiatives, harmon.ie has appointed two technology veterans to helm efforts in the Americas and EMEA. They are:

• Mark Fidelman, General Manager and Vice President of Sales, Americas. Fidelman’s experience includes more than two decades of technology sales and marketing with organizations including A.T. Kearney, EDS, CT Space and Autodesk, most recently serving as Executive Vice President of Sales and Customer Success with enterprise social knowledge base provider MindTouch, Inc. He is also a contributing writer to multiple publications and holds a patent on a system for tracking mobile electronic loyalty cards.
• Ran Shribman, General Manager and Vice President of Sales, EMEA. Based in the UK, Shribman joined harmon.ie in 2010 as Director of Sales. He has over 15 years’ experience in sales and sales management of enterprise software solutions, developing business from scratch both in Europe and Asia Pacific. He has held vice president and director-level sales positions with companies including ActionBase Software Solutions, WorkLight, Cognitens and Dassault Systems.

NEW CUSTOMERS

harmon.ie’s year-to-date 180 percent sales growth brings the company’s total paid end user base to nearly 400,000, with another 400,000 downloads of the freemium version. New customers based in 12 countries include:

• The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which began deploying SharePoint two years ago to improve administrative operations and support people who manage and execute more than 100 grant programs. HRSA purchased harmon.ie to give employees simple drag-and-drop access to SharePoint within email, where people spend a large part of their workday. "Easy, convenient access to SharePoint is the key to bringing everyone on board, so they can collaborate better and have immediate access to the people and information they need,” said Steve Smith, Director of Collaboration Services.
• Environmental engineering firm Hazen and Sawyer in the U.S., which has fully deployed SharePoint for document collaboration and control. IT Manager Russell Lampart estimates that only 40 percent use SharePoint for document collaboration, however, and no one uploads project emails into shared workspaces. That’s changing as the company deploys harmon.ie. "Easily 75 percent of people that have harmon.ie use it regularly to upload emails and attachments on SharePoint. What people love about harmon.ie is it’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it works."
• The City of Langford in Canada, which is deploying harmon.ie in conjunction with SharePoint 2010 to give employees immediate access to project-related emails and documents that are critical to city operations, including 450,000 email messages currently stored in individual user email boxes. “Last winter, when a flood caused property damage, a staff engineer recovered two-year old email correspondence regarding the engineering of the drainage system from his inbox,” said Mike Palmer, Manager of Information Technology. “Gaining access to email trapped in people’s inboxes is why we need harmon.ie and a centralized document management system. “
• Batteriid Architects in Iceland, which deployed harmon.ie to promote SharePoint adoption. According to Thorarinn Malmquist, partner and quality manager for the firm, "It took too many steps to actually use SharePoint as part of day-to-day project work, so people continued to email thousands of schematic design, design development, and construction documents back and forth. harmon.ie has changed all that. Today, people use harmon.ie and SharePoint to collaborate on all our projects, as well as collect documents and important emails in a centralized place."
• Sacmi Imola S.C. in Italy, an international machinery and plant manufacturer that adopted harmon.ie to enable its technical support team to easily upload and share customer emails and documents on SharePoint. “We needed an application to improve our email connection with SharePoint, and Alya srl, our local Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, recommended harmon.ie,” said Andrea Mascagni, Network Manager. “harmon.ie is very useful. It works well and is very easy to use. Our technical support team uses it every day.”

Other new customers this year include Switzerland-based Continental Automotive, a global brake and electronics supplier to the automotive industry; BearingPoint Gmbh, a European management and technology consulting company; and TRAC Records, a Canadian records and information management service.

About harmon.ie

harmon.ie (pronounced ‘harmony’) is a provider of social email software that brings document collaboration to every business user by transforming the email client into a collaboration and social workspace. Thousands of businesses already use harmon.ie social email to vastly increase user adoption of Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs for document sharing, collaboration, and social networking. Formerly known as Mainsoft, the company has been building cross-platform enterprise software since 1993. For more information, visit http://harmon.ie/

All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.