Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 10)

SM: What is your channel strategy? Direct in the enterprise, Telesales for SME? MG: Very close. At the enterprise it is a direct sales force, distributed globally. In SME, it is telesales, our own telesales team. We have a lot of partners we do business with where we get a fee for transacting through our system. For example, if you want to hire someone, and you want to do a background check, or pass jobs on to another job board, there are multiple vendors we pass transactions onto and we get paid for the number of transactions we put through.

SM: None of the system integrators are involved in that process? MG: Not really. We are the number one provider for the HRO business Line. When IBM, EDS and those types of companies are doing large scale business process outsourcing, we are their partner of choice when it comes to talent management.

SM: In the HR outsourcing space, the Indian outsourcers have always had a big practice. Is that something you compete with? MG: Not so much, and they do not have a big practice in HR outsourcing. None of the InfoSys’s and Tata’s have secured largescale HR outsourcing contracts. The ones that have been the strongest are the IBM’s and Accenture’s. That seems to be a niche the Indian outsourcers have not focused on.

SM: Interesting, I didn’t know that. You had a very good quarter. Would you like to discuss the highlights of your results? MG: Sure. For 2007, we grew bookings across the board. Internationally we grew 58%. In SME, we grew 119%. We had a number of new products and we released 7.5, which was our biggest release ever. We launched performance management, which was the biggest new product we have brought to market and we did it on time and on budget. Our platform processed over 1.2M hires from over 25M job applicants. We currently support more than a million users in 190 countries with 99.9% availability. I don’t think there is another software on demand company that comes close to that volume level. We added 717 SME customers in 2007. We also increased international revenue by 63% and international customers comprise 10% of annual revenues.

This segment is part 10 in the series : Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire
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