In Conservation with Sumitaka Kanno, HeartCore Inc President and CEO: ‘We Enable you to Provide the Best Content Optimized for Each Customer by Analyzing what Website Visitors are Looking for and Expecting’

“Interactive pages are not a strong point of a CMS, but our CMS can handle any page without limitations.”

Sumitaka Kanno was born in 1965 in Japan. When he was in the fifth grade, he was hooked on electronics, and in the first year of junior high school, he built his own microcomputer with an Intel 8080 processor and did everything by himself, including the BIOS. When he was in high school, he was the only person in Japan to sign a contract with the connection by packet communication to the United States when there was no Internet.

In high school, Sumitaka was a computer boy who worked part-time, creating software for many companies.

When he was in college, he decided to get away from computers and enjoyed his college life.

After graduating, Sumitaka joined the Air Self-Defense Force as a pilot. After retiring from the SDF, he started his own company and led the snowboarding boom in Japan, but his company went bankrupt. After that, he created and sold several companies, then went to work for an American IT company and started his current company, which became the largest CMS company in Japan and is still going strong.

Currently, Sumitaka, president, serves as the Chief Executive Officer of HeartCore Inc.

The company was incorporated in 2009 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It has additional office locations in Okinawa (Japan), Palo Alto, and San Mateo (USA).

Sumitaka Kanno, HeartCore Inc President and CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. What is the contemporary landscape of Content creation, and how does your CMS contribute to content creators’ growth?

In the past, web pages were like catalogs, presenting uniform information to anyone who visited the web.

Nowadays, the audiences can judge in a fraction of a second whether or not the content is what they need, and if they don’t, they will leave and never visit again. Personalization and recommendations are a must-have feature. Furthermore, in the post-Covid-19 hive consumption, the ability to automatically find further products and information at the point of need is required.

In addition to the web, integration with social media such as Twitter and Instagram is also essential.

Our CMS provides all of these functions for the web and can be used with a simple setup without a content creator’s hassle.

We are currently the only CMS that integrates and analyzes a variety of data from the web, chat, social media, and in-store purchase data to achieve journey orchestration.

Q. How do you make your service user friendly because most of the CMS often has limitations for editing, file types, graphics, etc.?

Our CMS is unique in that there are no limitations. Content creators can use the HTML created by the design company as a template so that any design company can use the CMS right away.

Interactive pages are not a strong point of a CMS, but our CMS can handle any page without limitations.

Q. Do you manage the entire range of content-related processes for a global audience?

Of course! Multilingual support is a given, taking into account time differences in publishing times, audience data integration, etc., all of which are global.

Q. What would you say is the single most influential factor of your business’ success?

The IT industry is evolving so fast that no one can predict what will happen in 10 years. But we can manage to predict it for three years in the future.

There is a need to develop technologies that will be standard in three years at this stage. You have to do the challenging task of creating something that nobody has done before.

Even if you can’t do it, you will never give up. You need to be willing not to give up until you’ve tried everything in the world.

Q. What other leaders do you look up to, and why?

Masayoshi Son of Softbank! He has never given up and has tried many things. There were many failures and significant losses, but he never gave up and took action to realize his strong desire. He continues to take on those challenges, even at the age of over 60.

Q. If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting as an entrepreneur, what would it be?

Have the enthusiasm and aspiration to succeed with all your heart. And a strong belief in never giving up. All successful people have achieved success with this mindset at all times.

If you’re working for a company right now, make sure you do that job to the best of your ability. When you go out on your own, the person you’re working with may become a business partner one day.

If you do your best work, they will trust you and be happy to do business with you.

If you do your work in a perfunctory manner, they will think of you as such and never do a good deal with you. Think of your current job as being for your future and give it your all!

Q. What do you think is the most memorable moment in your career?

When I was working for a US company in the past year, I did my best to deal with local Japanese customers, against the management’s judgment at the time.

The company decided that the bug was a specification and chose not to take action. But inevitably, I thought the customer’s opinion was right, and I went against the company’s decision with my beliefs and responded to the end.

When I started my own business as an entrepreneur, there was no case study of the product, and big companies wouldn’t buy the product without a case study. But when I introduced the product to a customer who was dealing with a US company, he told me that he was still afraid to use it without a case study.

However, he doesn’t trust the product at all, but he trusts me. He didn’t run away from his old business dealings. He did his best to deal with them. He told me: “You are worthy of trust, and I trust you to buy the product for me.”

After this customer installed the product, we immediately began to see more and more cases from major companies.

That’s exactly when I knew my beliefs were correct.

Q. If not a business leader, what else you wish to be?

I wanted to be an inventor. You don’t have to be a business leader to enjoy creating something that doesn’t exist in the world.

In particular, it’s a great job to create a product that no one else has done.

Q. What does the future hold for Heartcore Inc and its employees? Are exciting things on the way?

We strive to be the foundation for the happiness of all our customers, employees, and suppliers. Our philosophy is to ‘Make People Happy’.

“We are currently the only CMS that integrates and analyzes a variety of data from the web, chat, social media, and in-store purchase data to achieve journey orchestration.”