Take a look at the HARMAN website. You’ll first see information about community outreach projects and the latest awards the company has received.
Scroll past that.
You’ll see solutions offered from navigation, security and audio in cars, to audio devices for consumers to enterprise integrated audio, lighting, video and control solutions, to connected services like cloud and analytics. Keep scrolling.
You’ll find news from the latest concert outfitted with HARMAN solutions to a recent tweet about a commercial for the company that Steph Curry recently starred in. Keep going until you reach a section marked “Ecosystem.”
HARMAN has been acquiring companies for years, most recently and impressively the control and automation and video distribution company AMX. Within this ecosystem there exist specimens at the top of their respective food chains, including AMX, JBL, AKG, BSS, Crown, Soundcraft, Martin and more. This ecosystem, however, does not thrive through survival of the fittest. Instead, each entity works together to grow the presence, power and profitability of the HARMAN atmosphere they now exist within.
So what is HARMAN now? Let’s focus on the corporate market and leave the consumer side for another discussion. HARMAN is a one-stop provider of enterprise AV and control solutions. HARMAN is also a provider of robust solutions in audio, video and control. HARMAN is also the manufacturer of some of the most high-end audio, video and control components on the market. HARMAN uses a vast base of research and development from the best minds that a number of highly-technical, industry-leading, acquired companies has to offer. HARMAN can also share that research throughout its ecosystem of companies so that they can all draw from the same well of knowledge. And the whole time, HARMAN has specific teams that customers can lean on to learn the best way to make all of these components, systems and solutions work together.
Building a Professional Services Utopia
It started with audio. The goal was to put together a constellation of category leaders along the signal chain from the microphone that picks up the audio to the loudspeaker that outputs it to the crowd. Rather than venture into unknown territories, HARMAN made the decision to acquire companies that have already built a presence for themselves in markets along the chain. JBL for loudspeakers, Crown for amplifiers, AKG for microphones and so on and so forth. So at each node of the signal chain customers are getting the best solution, and rather than struggle to force these pieces to work together, they’ve been designed to work together by virtue of belonging to the same ecosystem.
“The acquisition has to appeal to our existing customer base or make our existing offerings available to new customers,” says Blake Augsburger, President of HARMAN Professional Solutions Division. “Ideally, an acquisition would do both. That was the case with several of our recent deals, where the value of the joint enterprise has been significantly greater than the sum of the parts. There are, however, baseline requirements. We look at organizations with a shared culture of innovation and proven commitment to solutions. We don’t consider commodity players or distressed companies.”
The top brands were able to keep their names, says Augsburger, because they had pioneered their respective fields and provided the industry with innovative technologies that had already set them apart. Instead of renaming and rebranding, HARMAN decided it was important to retain that notoriety while providing inclusion for the company within the HARMAN network as a whole. “In instances where the acquired brand is dominant in a technology domain and is widely understood, followed and admired in the market, we’ll keep it as a sub-brand of HARMAN. This was the case with Martin Professional and AMX.”
Keeping the branding of top companies worked great, but HARMAN still needed to provide an overall structure for the ecosystem to follow. So HARMAN created the System Development Integration Group (SDIG), and SDIG created HiQnet, a software with configuration and control protocol that sits on top of the components to give a unified technology interface for configuring and controlling the system. Now, integrators could easily compile the different pieces and ensure systems worked properly.
The Evolving Ecosystem
It evolved from there, as most ecosystems do. As systems integrators spent time programming these audio solutions into a more robust system, HARMAN found an opportunity to expand this idea into other areas of the supply chain. The company could apply the same principals to video systems and control systems, and then tie the systems together to create a macro version – not only with strong components working together in the system, but with strong systems working together in an overall solution.
“We have a shared goal now, and that’s to design and build customer-centric solutions,” says Jeff Kindig, formerly of AMX and now a member of the Creative Services Group for HARMAN Professional Division Global Marketing. “I think everyone across the organization understands that and is very excited about it. We have a great vision, strong leadership, excellent talent and great customers and partners. That’s an excellent position to be in.”
That vision and leadership comes in the form of Strategic Business Units (SBUs) and Customer Solutions Units (CSUs), a structure that HARMAN came up with to ensure that products are working together in a way that allows customers to get the most out of solutions within the HARMAN ecosystem.
“We recently restructured HARMAN Professional Solutions into three SBUs: Enterprise, Entertainment and Product. The Entertainment and Enterprise SBUs are broken down into CSUs,” says Augsburger. “The CSUs are dedicated teams with a simple, yet powerful, mandate: Provide customers in vertical markets with greater market expertise and market-specialized solutions. Our CSUs are empowered with the resources required to deliver on that mandate. There will be a single point of access and accountability with specialized teams, technologies and programs for each vertical market. This customer-centric organizational model will make it much easier for customers to do business with HARMAN Professional Solutions.”
HARMAN companies can drop different products into different HARMAN SBUs, and customers can search the SBU baskets for different things that they need. In addition, customers can reach out to HARMAN CSUs to learn how the different components within these buckets can work together best. The company hopes to change their approach from a brand-centric approach to a customer-centric approach, and it begins with SBUs – categorizing products rather than categorizing brands.
“Rolling products into useful solutions has made it easier for us to do business with HARMAN Professional Solutions,” says Nathan Powell, a consultant and President of PTC Group. “Now, the industry can just go to one provider for all the products in a system; those products work better together, and there is one brand to count on instead of six or more pointing fingers at one another. The acquisitions have made a lot of sense and also allowed many in the industry to expand into more areas, like lighting, video and control. Products now work better together, and it’s excellent to have a single source of access and accountability from one manufacturer.”
Components and Systems and Solutions – Oh My
The AV industry is converging with the IT industry, and even within that convergence there are convergences occurring. Displays and tablets are melding together to give us large format touch-screen displays. Audio input and output systems are combining to create single hardware solutions for every need. Automation systems are controlling everything from the lamp to the two-story video wall in the lobby. Rather than try to do everything at once, HARMAN went out and acquired companies that knew how to do everything and helped them work together to get it done at once.
JBL is still going to create JBL products. Crown will do the same. AMX, AKG and HARMAN will all offer components, no doubt. But they will work together in an ecosystem to make sure that the whole is functioning as fully as the individual. HARMAN Professional Solutions has become the Great Barrier Reef of corporate technology providers.
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Interesting I have just read Harman has been acquired by Samsung