Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Shan Sinha, CEO of HighFive (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you point new entrepreneurs to open opportunities where companies can be built.

Shan Sinha: If you take all the problems that we’re solving today, and you said, “That problem is solved.” What you have at the end of that is essentially a dump pipe that allows a bunch of people to talk to each other.

Now that you have all of that information in the cloud, how do you get more value out of it? How do you take that dumb pipe and turn it into a smart pipe. Once people can get connected to a meeting, how can people get more value from the technology that helps them do more, that helps them take care of all of the work that gets created in meetings? How do you take meeting technologies and make it smarter? I don’t think there’s anybody that has emerged that does that exceedingly well.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a question on that. There are always a lot of meetings happening. When I think about all the content that is being generated in this mode, what is the repository of this content? Where are the recordings? Where are the transcripts? Are they searchable? If somebody misses a meeting, how can they go and catch up? Is that infrastructure in place?

Shan Sinha: I think that’s exactly the area that we’re talking about. What you’ll find is meetings exist for the time the meeting goes on. Then they disappear into the ether. None of the information gets organized like the way you see happening in email or documents that people create. There’s a black hole of potential knowledge that happens inside of companies that isn’t really well indexed or organized. While we provide the infrastructure to allow that stuff to be stored, how much value does that have? That remains an open question.

Sramana Mitra: There’re all kinds of workflow around that, right? If you’re talking about a project meeting, then the project management system needs to be woven into this workflow. If you’re talking about a sales meeting, then the CRM system needs to be woven around the meeting. If you’re talking about customer support, that’s a different work flow.

Shan Sinha: I would say work flow is one part of it. What about just raw intelligence? I think there’s a lot of potential intelligence along with opportunities around work flow. I think it’s unclear right now. If I have to pop up a level and synthesize some of the potential opportunities, I’d take it from the perspective of, “What’s the reason why a particular company should make sure that every meeting is recorded?”

Once you have the reason in place, then you can say, “We’re going to put some infrastructure in place to hold and index all that information.” The next step after that is, what sort of work flows can you create now that that’s in place? What kind of intelligence can an organization and the leaders of an organization glean from that? I think all of that is unchartered territory right now.

Sramana Mitra: What is the sweet spot of your customer base’s use cases?

Shan Sinha: We see it across the board. Our solution doesn’t require any download. That enables all kinds of interesting use cases like people recruiting candidates. It’s much better to do video screens as opposed to phone screens. We have lots of everyday collaboration meetings.

One of the things that’s really unique that we’ve seen is that we turn video into a tool that people can use on an everyday basis. If you look at some of our bigger customers, they use videos every single day. The use cases are varied. Video is becoming a part of our everyday lives. FaceTime and YouTube are very popular. There are lots of videos everywhere.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Shan Sinha, CEO of HighFive
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