Hoylu is an online whiteboard making remote worklife easier especially in this period of a global COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and the age of “Work From Home“. CEO Stein Revelsby will be sharing more details with us in an exclusive interview with TechBullion.
Please tell us your name and a little more about yourself?
Hello my name is Stein Revelsby and I am the founder and CEO of Hoylu. I am a serial entrepreneur born and raised on a small farm in the Norwegian countryside with more than 30 years of experience within investment banking, venture capital and private equity. I founded Hoylu in late 2016 with the vision to take collaboration beyond videoconferencing and simple screen-sharing to make remote work and information sharing easy. I have extensive experience as a board member and manager of tech and IT companies in Scandinavia and the US. I hold a Master’s degree in Business and Economics from Norwegian School of Management (BI), is a Norwegian citizen and resides in the US as a permanent resident.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
What is Hoylu and what unique services do you provide?
Hoylu’s mission is to make remote work and information sharing easy. Hoylu offers an online whiteboard platform for visual collaboration. The Hoylu experience helps enterprise clients manage activities, visualize work and motivate people to perform their best by avoiding miscommunication and secure success. The software is offered as a service (SaaS).
Hoylu’s customer base are large global enterprises within construction, engineering, healthcare and consumer products with a constant need to digitize workflows, innovate and improve productivity, as well as institutions within higher education.
Hoylu’s online whiteboard platform is called Connected Workspaces and can expand horizontally and vertically up to 50,000 pages. The workspace can be shared with anyone anywhere on any device by clicking a web link so that the whole team can work together at the same time. The workspace is always saved automatically and all your information is there when you log in next time. You can import any document or file format into the Workspace so that you have all your information in the same place. By having all your information in context, users save a lot of time before and after meetings and everybody is kept up to date. Project plans and schedules can be presented and maintained in the same Workspace with related information like documents, pictures, drawings and comments.
Hoylu is easy to use for everybody with a minimalistic design and a dynamic user interface that is configured with just the features and functions you need for a specific job. Hoylu is integrated with MSFT Teams and available for Mac in Apple’s App store. Hoylu can be used with Zoom or any video conferencing solution.
What is the market size and level of demand for a Hoylu platform?
Hoylu is a newcomer and a challenger within collaboration solutions. The collaborative solutions industry is a $40 billion market and includes unified communications, video conferencing, online whiteboarding, file sharing and group chat solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of collaborative solutions as people have been forced to work from their homes. Hoylu launched a new product in April, earlier than originally planned, due to the ongoing global COVID-19 situation. Hoylu fits within a new emerging category of Visual Collaboration solutions, together with companies like Miro and Mural.
Hoylu believes that by using enterprise collaboration and connecting the right people with the right expertise or information at the right time will help employees to make the right business decision, work more efficiently and increase productivity in combination with enhanced innovation.
Enterprise collaboration broadly fall into one of several categories as defined by McKinsey & Company:
Communication: Tools that enable synchronous and asynchronous communication, including videoconferencing, instant messaging, white-boarding tools, and email.
Team collaboration: Tools that help teams organize their work and work product, including file sharing, project planning/management, group calendaring, and event scheduling.
Writing/editing: Tools that help teams work together on documents and/or publish documents, including wikis and online documents processing tools.
Engaging/networking: Sites and tools that enable social media, networking and blogging.
Remote working has become more popular since COVID-19, tell us more about remote collaboration with Hoylu for enterprise?
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of collaborative solutions. Hoylu’s Software Applications for Enterprise provide teams with a collaboration experience unlike any other. A project that started in the conference room can live on in small breakouts through Hoylu from any device, anywhere, any time. Organizations can equip their teams with a tool that translates the whiteboard experience or sticky note planning to a digital shared format that can be accessed remotely and shared with unlimited users.
Hoylu provides an easy to learn and even easier to use solution to digitally transform from analog work. Sharing photos and updating PDF’s is not a productive way to do work, with Hoylu it’s already in the cloud, ready to be accessed at any time and anywhere which is critical today due to COVID-19.
Additionally, Hoylu’s solution offers Enterprises with security, admin control, easy configuration, advanced security permissions, customer service, and custom onboarding to ensure your organization is set up for success.
- Security: Hoylu’s applications are secure workspaces stored in the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
- Administration: Easily control your organization with our Admin Panel, set access rights, assign accounts, and more.
- Single Sign On: Hoylu integrates your Single Sign On process to be easily configured for use with Hoylu Applications.
- Advanced Permissions: Shared Workspaces can be given advanced permissions based on your internal security needs.
- Customer Success Manager: As a Hoylu Enterprise customer you are provided a dedicated Customer Success Manager.
- Custom On-Boarding: Every organization is different so we offer a custom on-boarding plan tailored to fit your needs.
Watch how Hoylu aids in remote work.
How does Hoylu’s Pull Planning Module impact the construction industry?
Several factors impact the construction industry’s slow adoption of technological advancements due to siloed initiatives, health and safety risks, limited resources and a workforce that is comfortable with what they know. A vast majority of construction firms still rely on analog whiteboards and paper sticky notes for planning, creating inefficient project management and development.
Today, Hoylu’s Pull Planning Module is creating revolutionary changes within construction planning and project management. Hoylu’s Pull Planning Module aims to increase productivity, reduce waste and save money. The solution is becoming widely adopted and recognized for its innovation and efficiency.
We recently worked with Skanska, a world-leading project development and construction group. You can read our case study here.
Watch this video to learn more about how Hoylu’s Pull Planning module simulates the analog experience of a traditional Pull Planning session in a digital setting.
Could you provide a walkthrough of Hoylu’s PI Planning for engineering, development and project management?
A PI Planning session determines the overall mission, vision, and plan for an AGILE Release Train. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) empowers organizations to drive faster time-to-market as well as increase productivity and employee engagement.
- Iterations: Users can organize their stories and features by iterations with drag & drop functionality.
- Establish Dependencies: Stories and features can be visually marked as dependencies with arrow connections.
- Manage Details: Customize the appearance and details of your stories.
- Import from Version 1: Upload your data from Version 1 to visually organize your iterations.
Tell us more about Hoylu for education, distance learning and virtual classrooms?
Hoylu is used by educators around the globe to facilitate their online classrooms. With a collaborative, online whiteboard, presentation tools, multimedia capabilities, and integrations with tools like Microsoft Office, distance learning has never been easier.
Check out our University of Washington use case here.
Could you tell us about your team and customer support?
Hoylu has a distributed organization, with the majority of its engineers and product management in Kirkland, WA, and smaller teams in Austria and Poland, as well as sales, business development and customer success teams in several locations in the US and EU. Hoylu’s partners and resellers are located across the world.
For more information or available opportunities, please inquire at hello@hoylu.com. or check out Hoylu and our use cases with partnering businesses.
