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Episode 138

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January 21, 2022

#138 Brinda Robin and the HARMAN Team: From Healthcare to Telecoms, Partners Are Shaping the Future

In this special episode of Ecosystem Aces, Chip is joined by the team from HARMAN International to discuss the company’s partnerships and ecosystem approach and strategy across the healthcare, telecommunications, and industrial spaces.

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In this special episode of Ecosystem Aces, Chip is joined by the team from HARMAN International to discuss the company’s partnerships and ecosystem approach and strategy across the healthcare, telecommunications, and industrial spaces.

These four industry leaders speak about the complexity of expanding the company’s strategic alliances and finding the right technology partners specializing in each industry vertical. 

This episode discusses:

  • How HARMAN’s is building a platform to facilitate a partner-driven future
  • The 3 types of ecosystem
  • The real-world applications for their platform in health, communications, and manufacturing


HARMAN’s Partner-Driven Platform

To specialize in various verticals, ecosystem collaboration is needed, and the right set of partners is vital for it. This is a complex process and brings out the creativity in executives and innovative business strategies for partner ecosystems. HARMAN focuses on continued technology disruption for better collaborations across industry verticals and leads a partner-driven future.

The company has a digital transformation business that offers end-to-end digital transformation services to customers from conception to implementation. Through this, partners get new opportunities, reduce implementation challenges, boost efficiency, and increase customer adoption. Even in the pandemic, technology innovations had a huge impact globally, but still, the creation and use of connected applications needed the right partner ecosystem to work. 

Most applications get attention after their launch, but there are many things behind the scenes that matter, like design, development, deployment, release, integration, testing, necessary customizations, etc., which won’t be possible without proper collaboration. So, HARMAN’s technology-agnostic approach makes them crucial influencers in partner ecosystems. Customers want customized UX, and HARMAN allows partner companies to gain advantage through the use of AR, VR, AI, Machine Learning, EDGE, etc., and go-to-market better. 

Brinda follows the 3 Es strategy: Explore, Encompass, and Enhance to choose the right horizontally and vertically aligned partners for HARMAN’s focus verticals.


HARMAN’s Healthcare Ecosystem

HARMAN aims to be the orchestrator of the connected care ecosystem. Healthcare involves the patient’s journey, the physician’s journey, and the service provider who needs to focus on all these dimensions and bring them together in a coordinated manner. So, to orchestrate activities in the massive healthcare industry, a partner ecosystem with data and integrated workflows is critical. 

To enter the connected healthcare ecosystem, HARMAN is investing in a clinical data platform, partnering with health systems, HIEs, etc., to get data on a common platform. This common platform can be added with new partners, for example, clinical trial companies, data from social websites, public registry data, etc. This amplifies the data in the common platform and generates more insights. The data can be used for clinical trials, patient monitoring, digital therapeutic solutions, etc. 

Also, the open platform can progress by adding partners anytime, which helps both the patients and healthcare service providers.  

HARMAN follows an orchestrator model for their common data platform, and alignment is a big challenge as well as data integration. So partners need to be aligned and ready to seamlessly integrate their solutions to transform the healthcare space and connected care industry. 


HARMAN’s Telecommunications Ecosystem

HARMAN is a subsidiary of Samsung and has access to its portfolio and global customer base, which strengthens its foray into the Telecommunications space. Many big companies are looking to launch new products and solutions but face competition from new players. Therefore, the need for new partners to differentiate and lead is vital for the telecommunications space. 

It is not possible for an individual company to build better, more innovative solutions faster without partners. Partnerships also offer flexibility and adaptation to market needs and customer requirements quickly. Through successful partnerships, companies can co-innovate better solutions for users, tap into new markets and grow their customer base, and offer better value to end customers. 

5G technology is capable of transforming many industries like telemedicine, automated driving, etc. IoT will help in machine-to-machine communication at lower latency and high reliability. Logistics, edge computing, manufacturing, etc., are improving too, and HARMAN leverages all of these. 

The company has opened a 5G device testing and validation lab in India and will soon open one in the USA as well. Developing edge computing solutions, new niche applications differentiated from competitors, working with auto OEMs in the C-V2X space for driverless cars, driver safety, etc., are other areas where HARMAN is expanding in the telecommunications space. 


HARMAN’s Industrial Ecosystem

More and more companies are becoming lean, agile, and flexible with manufacturing in how they organize the supply chain, the market needs, etc. This is because:

  • Companies want more agility, autonomous operations, and automated manufacturing lines that reduce the human touch in products. 
  • Technology has matured now, and companies want affordable technology that will offer results and can be materialized into effective use. 
  • Companies want automation that allows workers to be remote without visiting the field. 

HARMAN is heavily engaged with industrial houses, manufacturing plants, smart cities, agriculture, and much more. All these industries are vast, and HARMAN brings new ideas to the table, new solutions, but it is not possible to do everything alone. So, working with partners, co-innovating, and co-investing with them is vital to bring ideal solutions and value for the end customers. 

HARMAN focuses on partner and vendor-agnostic solutions so that customers can easily switch to better, more cost-effective solutions if necessary. There may be many issues that the company cannot solve itself, so finding the right partners and co-innovating, co-developing the ideal solutions becomes necessary. Focusing on partners’ core competencies, understanding customers’ business processes, and combining both of them leads to the right end solutions. 


Summing Up

Backed by Samsung, HARMAN is on the right track with its partner ecosystems and developing innovative solutions for multiple industry verticals. The company is already in partnership with the likes of Microsoft, AWS, etc., and is working on core innovations and development in the healthcare, telecommunications, and industrial verticals. 

Brinda and these industry practice leaders spoke about how HARMAN leverages their partner ecosystem across all three verticals for everything they do. The HARMAN partner ecosystem is critical for their GTM strategy and success in the market.


For more information or to contact any one of these executives, you can visit the LinkedIn profiles of Brinda Robin, JK Sharma, Keerthi Kumar, and Prakash Desai.  

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