Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 12)

SM: How many engineers worked on the new product? MG: We don’t break out how many engineers work on what products.

SM: The reason I am asking that question is more intelligent than it sounds. SaaS companies have a big operational overhead to come to market and get established, but then additional products are not very expensive to add on top. MG: That is another differentiator about Taleo. We have a very large and sophisticated product for the enterprise market. When we launched performance management, we launched it in 17 languages on day one.

We drive more transaction volume than SalesForce.com. There are 1.3 Million registered users. We have 1.5 Billion transactions per quarter, which is 20 Million per day. The number of hires per quarter is 300,000. The total number of cumulative hires is 3.2 Million. The number of candidates we process per quarter is 6.8 Million. We have 10.3 terabytes of data under management. When we talk about engineering, we talk about sophisticated engineering.

SM: True, but you do not have to repeat all of the operational overhead of bringing a new product to market. MG: Not the operational overhead, we have two datacenters which are standardized and configured. But bringing an application that is SAS 70 type 2 compliant, that can get through the most stringent of security audits and can work in multiple countries, 7×24, this is sophisticated engineering.

SM: What is your guidance for 2008? MG: We said we would do revenue between $154 and $157, and we have an exit operating margin of 11%.

SM: What is the growth strategy for 2008? Are you looking at acquisitions, or are you going to stay focused on your core products? MG: All of the above. We put a lot of headcount into international because we think international is finally ready to boom with SaaS and talent management. We are expanding the sales force in SMB as well as the engineering staff. We will have performance management for SMB in the second half of the year. We are expanding the sales and marketing of our company for our new performance management product. We are building a new data center internationally, and a second new development center in Eastern Europe. It is a big new year for us and we expect to take advantage of the growth that comes from those investments.

This segment is part 12 in the series : Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire
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