SmallCapPower spoke recently with Peter Smyrniotis, HealthSpace Data SystemsLtd.’s (CSE: HS) new Chief Commercialization Officer (CCO), who’s excited about not only a taking a good product and making it better but also expanding HealthSpace’s sales to commercial enterprise clients.
SmallCapPower (SCP): Welcome Peter! Please tell us a bit about the experience you bring to HealthSpace Data Systems Ltd. (CSE: HS) and what the role of Chief Commercialization Officer entails.
Peter Smyrniotis (PS): I’m an enterprise technology professional. One of my first jobs out while completing my studies was at Magna International Inc. in Germany, and it was a culture of self-starters. I learned that technology is basically powerless without good people. If there was a value proposition I learned, it was that technology onto itself is just innovation. And innovation without people to use it doesn’t do anything. While working out of Vancouver for the past 15 years with large Tier-1 vendors and supporting clients across Canada and internationally, it gave me the opportunity to understand how public sector and commercial enterprises, both large and small, would thrive when equipped with the best technology, the best data set, and the meaningful insights that would come from it. I think that experience in enterprise enabled me to be prepared to walk into this role with servicing companies, such as HealthSpace. And I think all of that cumulative expertise and comprehension on product and technologies’ impact correlate with the fact that while I was at these Tier-1 vendors I was selling – selling myself, I was selling with teams. I led some teams, I led initiatives internally. It gave me the opportunity to provide tangible and practical value to clients who really needed it. But when you wrap it all together, what you’re talking about is taking a product and commercializing it. My reputation in start-ups was that if I could grow something and generate a large business development strategy in commercialized technology and products with basically no budget, imagine what I could do if I was given access to budget.
So what I do is bring value on driving sustainable, predictable, and innovative growth.
I was brought on board to HealthSpace with specific mandates to take the existing product roadmap, further expand its capabilities, reach, and built out a sales and marketing mechanism, and engineer a process beneath that, which will deliver sustainable growth over the foreseeable future.
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SCP: What improvements are you looking forward to making at HealthSpace?
PS: I’ve known about HealthSpace for a year and a half and I saw a lot of value early on. I saw the management team bring a great deal of value to what they had and then find through acquisition a more sophisticated Cloud offering. So there was already momentum underway when I got here. I found two regional offices that were communicating effectively, a healthy pipeline of public-sector opportunities, two new products that are pending release in the next 15 to 20 days, best of breed mobile technology, a strong initial Cloud offering, and a willingness internally from the product team and the business development team to work together to build that early scale. The best thing about it, that surprised me, was that HealthSpace has more than a decade of health data 
on file. So we have rich, vibrant tapestry of information available to us. During the past couple of weeks we’ve had internal discussions that are being infused into an updated product roadmap to a build an intelligent set of mechanisms in software to serve our data better to commercial clients, who would not only want this information but would be able to mine that information. So we could take this information to commercial enterprise, we could take it to public sector. There’s a movement in the United States for open data to share data with the U.S. government through one major pipe. And there’s a public demand for that, so people can make intelligent use of it. And the public needs to have this data. People are getting access to better quality food, better quality services because HealthSpace’s technology is in the hands of government officials who are able to rapidly check and re-visit facilities in their State, and then report back – and that saves lives. I believe firmly that we’re going to expand on that, that we need to tell that narrative better. And better technology combined with a strong narrative to market will deliver that.
SCP: In your opinion, what makes HealthSpace attractive from an investment perspective?
PS: First, and foremost, what I like is it’s a battle-tested technology. So there’s a ton of reliability in the core technology already built, and the new Cloud-based initiatives are infused with all the learnings of the materials that were built and being already purchased today. But we’re taking what use to be a very interesting public sector purchasing story, and we’re enhancing and expanding the total available market opportunity to commercial enterprise organizations. HealthSpace can take its service offering and have their internal organizations and internal compliance officers get ahead of the curve and be able to better manage their internal teams.
So as an investor I’m seeing a company that’s already doing well and that can, at the minimum, quadrupled its access to the total available market and it doesn’t have to be done with just the existing technology, which is good and reliable, but with something that’s fast and available on multi-platform devices through Cloud-enabled services and custom-native apps, which is how about 73% of people use systems through mobile devices. And now we can push that out into the hands of inspectors, into dashboards for management, into dashboards and notification systems for clients.
Customers that use HealthSpace’s technology love it. If you look at the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the E. coli outbreak linked to Chipotle, there’s a demand for technology that can service this.
SCP: Where do you expect HealthSpace’s growth to come from?
PS: Moving beyond government organizations and expanding into serving commercial enterprise organizations, such as national food chains, distribution organizations, logistic companies that supply meats and vegetables that get inspected from site to site as the goods go into our food logistics system. If we want to know how food gets transferred from one part of the country to the other and who’s tracking that, what does that look like? That’s a whole new territory of business. And an interesting level beyond that, we have the ability to make our data available both real time and historically and provide insights to organizations that would want to mine that data and look for insights for themselves, such as Yelp. Our data would also be of interest to researchers, colleges/universities, virologist, etc. HealthSpace can also develop technology to better access how people capture that information and review that information, so we can serve up even more powerful data as time goes on.
SCP: Thank you for your time Peter.
To find out more about HealthSpace Data Systems Ltd., please visit the company’s Investor Hub.
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