SnapSupport CEO Madhu Augustine Joins Harvest Technology Group as Vice President of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Product Development Serial entrepreneur excited to accelerate growth for Harvest across industries Bangalore, India– When his career at Life Technologies (now Thermo Fisher Scientific) led him to a product management role,Madhu Augustinesuddenly interfaced with field and sales teams who sold and serviced his company’s products daily. He quickly noticed there were quite a few gaps when it came to supporting field personnel and customers as new products were rolled out. Augustine did not hesitate and came up with a technology idea to solve those problems which eventually became a company calledSnapSupport. AfterHarvest Technology Groupacquired SnapSupport earlier this year, the company also knew they had brought in a serial entrepreneur who will help expand the company’s innovative footprint into various industries. “My experience in the field motivated me to see how we could use mobile technology to make the support process more efficient for end-users, field teams, and engineers and deliver information and support instantly from anywhere in a company,” explains Augustine. “At the end of that day, if you’re a customer or a field technician you need that quick support when you run into issues. Especially if you’re in the field or in the lab and there is no one around, you need something to connect to others, communicate, and get assistance. There was nothing available at that point and that’s when we decided to pursue SnapSupport.” The initial idea for SnapSupport was to deliver an Instagram-like app for customer support where you send a picture or video to receive help. Augustine and his team were looking at the market for support through live video, but there were no chat options or places to post questions. In 2017 they developed a prototype and signed up their first customer in New Zealand and officially launched SnapSupport. From Kerala to Silicon Valley For most of his technology career, Augustine has figured out technical solutions to solve real-life problems he encountered. Born and raised in Kerala, India, he completed his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the National Institute of Technology. After working in New Delhi, Augustine moved to Houston to become a consultant in the oil & gas industry and then later to Illinois, for Abbott Labs, where he became interested in life sciences. In 2000 he pursued an 11-year career at Applied Biosystems, the company that developed technology to sequence the human genome. 
Augustine initially worked as an engineering lead developing software for instrumentation, but after he completed an Executive MBA for Wharton, San Francisco, he eventually took a field role in product management in 2007 for the company’s product line of reagents which netted annual sales of more than $100 million. After his departure in 2011, Augustine started his own company that delivered cloud-based analysis software that gathers data for multiple instruments into one place and analyzed it, which was bought by Thermo Fisher in 2013. In 2013, he also started the services company Ceino in parallel to develop innovative mobile, cloud, and web applications that help drive customer engagement and automate business processes.
Once his first product was sold, Augustine remembered the issues he encountered during his days in the field and started his effort to explore a solution that would deliver mobile technology for end-users, field teams, to deliver support. Right after he kickstarted SnapSupport he moved a small team of engineers to a Plug ‘n Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, CA to really develop the solution. Initially, the company focused on the life sciences industry which moved very slow. As they looked to expand into other industries, they needed technology partners and Harvest Technology Group was high on SnapSupport’s radar from a technology perspective. Enter Harvest “Andy Loweryhad just left Realwear to join Harvest and we connected with him,” explains Augustine. “If you look at the market, there are some low-bandwidth solutions out there, but none are as good as Harvest. We also believe that SnapSupport has a solution that no one else in the market offers, so our platform combined with Harvest’s great video technology is a win-win partnership.” The joint vision for the two companies is to deliver a horizontal support solution for customers across vertical industries, no matter the channel. Another key element that SnapSupport offers its customers is the ability to capture what they learn from their stakeholders’ interactions and collaborations while using the solution. “The learning/AI component is going to be big for us going forward to capture and deliver knowledge,” says Augustine, who now lives in India with his family. “A lot of field interactions go unnoticed or unrecorded. If you use our channels, we can capture all the information and we learn from the experience. This helps make the solution more productive and it proactively equips technicians with information before they go out to a site. It will also help us inform customers proactively on issues we are already aware of.” | 
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