Our customers are increasingly competing in a complete ecosystem driven worlds, where their end-users utilize component solution elements from edge-devices to cloud services, informed through analytics-driven contextualized information. As HARMAN Connected Services, we had a good story to tell – but we didn’t have a very large megaphone to tell that story with.
Now, when I plan new solutions that take advantage of technology or market changes, I have a great, widely known brand-name and high quality product components that I can throw into the story we tell within target vertical market segments. For instance, when working with media content delivery customers, and pitching 2nd display experiences (moving media consumption from a TV, to a handset or tablet), I can now also add automotive media consumption capability to the story – referencing HARMAN’s IVI, greatly increasing the value and opportunity to our customers to deliver content anywhere, anytime to their users. Similarly, I can now offer HARMAN Embedded Audio components into edge-device solutions that we develop for our customers.
Just as valuable, we get business opportunity assistance with our customers who either buy product or have a multi-million dollar distribution relationship with that customer and use that leverage to get doors opened up for us!
This makes for a very much larger megaphone to tell our story with, and the credibility that comes from our services competencies.
And that leverage is bi-directional!
Our relationships as the preferred system integrator scale-out partner with Google Android is helping HARMAN’s IVI and Lifestyle divisions deliver product concepts and new ecosystem-based enhancements to their product & solution roadmaps. And our experience and competencies in edge-device development is being used to provide key software feature differentiation to products that have historically been hardware-led.
And so… I love the story that we can now tell, loudly, about HARMAN. We are all HARMAN!
Chris Schoppa - Sr. Director Smart Device Solutions and Strategy Connect with him on LinkedIn.
