WIRe Series – Horst Feldhaeuser – Infotools

Welcome to the WIRe Series. Recorded live in Austin, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from the WIRe MRx Meet & Mingle event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Horst Feldhaeuser, Group Services Director (SVP) at Infotools. Contact Horst Online: LinkedIn Infotools [00:00] Horst, the Group Services Director at InfoTools.  It is an honor to have you on this show. I’ve been following you guys for quite a while.  Tell me a little bit about the business. [00:13]    Well, InfoTools is a company that’s been around for 28 years now, based in New Zealand, but we have offices all around the world.  And we do everything from the data to the delivery to the people: so data analysis, data harmonization, dashboarding, socialization, all that kind of stuff.   [00:31] So, the gamut. [00:32] The gamut, yes.  Apart from the data collection, we do it. [00:36] No kidding. [00:36]    And we’re good at it. [00:37] Yeah, yeah, good.  So, 29 years is a storied brand in our space.  What kind of technologies have you guys built out as InfoTools?   [00:46]       Yeah, so, we’ve started off with a desktop tool basically to analyze the data as our first step, and then gradually over the years, obviously, we’ve moved into the cloud.  So, our biggest tool is now the cloud-based called InfoTools Harmoni. It’s been used by big companies like Coca-Cola, or Unilever (no, not Unilever, sorry), Orange, Shell, Samsung, and more and more market research companies as well.  So it’s really a tool for DIY or for the services… [01:12] Well, we’ll have to get this podcast in front of Unilever so they can be a customer also. [01:15] Yeah, exactly, they should be.   [01:17] So, you guys have teamed up with the University of Auckland Business School to help give students in market research some hands-on experience.  Tell me a little bit about that. [01:27] Yeah, that’s really a great partnership with them, and we’ve been in contact with them for a long time.  They’ve been very close with the market research industry in New Zealand, and they have a market research competition since about 2011, where they have students working on real-life projects and there is literally it’s like a “Market Research Got Talent” thing with a competition, with judges from the market research industry and from the client side.  They’re doing a lot with not-for-profit studies, and this year it’s with a corporation called Housing New Zealand Housing Foundation. We decided with our new cloud-based tool why not give it to them for free and have them use that instead of some of the other tools that we don’t think are quite as funky. [02:11] That’s pretty cool. [02:12] That’s very cool.  And we just started the project.  We just had a big training session with them with their previous data, and once they get the new data in,