Harmon.ie Inc. today became the latest player to address cloud sprawl with a new service that promises to consolidate off-premise data sources into a unified view of the user’s workflow. The launch extends the startup’s strategic focus beyond Microsoft’s and IBM’s collaboration portfolios to the more modern tools on the mobile worker’s belt.
Known as Collage, the product shares the goal of removing cloud silos with Grow, another recently unveiled service that enables small- and medium-sized business (SMB) owners to pull information from different platforms into centralized dashboards for better visibility into their operations. But whereas Grow’s creators have taken the self-service route toward enterprise data visualization, Harmon.ie is aiming for the pre-packaged experience more commonly found in the mobile universe.
To that end, Collage integrates third party services into a central feed that aggregates and displays the most important notifications from across the user’s various cloud accounts in real time. The app also correlates those alerts with calender data, project updates and any other work information crossing the stream to create threads that Harmon.ie says provide valuable context on topics such as team assignments and upcoming events without requiring workers to search through tabs for details.
Collage packs a built-in search bar that takes most of the hassle out of looking for such information, making it possible to filter the feed by person, topic or task and leveraging a tagging system that accommodates both structured and unstructured data. Once employees find the notification they’re looking for, they can fire up the application they require to respond directly from the native interface, which takes an additional few seconds out of the process. Added up, that can make for a smoother experience.
On launch, Collage only integrates notifications from Salesforce.com, Office 365 and the Yammer enterprise social network, with support for more services due to arrive next year. Harmon.ie didn’t say which solutions are in the pipeline, but Outlook and IBM’s Notes are likely candidates given the prominent role of the email platforms in its other products. There’s also a more than good chance that the startup will throw its weight behind Verse, the spiritual successor to Notes that Big Blue unveiled last month with the promise of making enterprise messaging more social and contextual.
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