Building A Software Company From Toulouse, France: Jacques Soumeillan, CEO Of Cameleon Software (Part 5)

Sramana: Did your business stabilize completely around 2004?

Jacques Soumeillan: Absolutely. At that time we decided that since we had reduced our workforce from 200 worldwide to 70, we really had to know what our next steps would be. In 2005, we decided to reinvent ourselves a bit. We felt that manufacturing was great but that new markets in the self-configuration space were our future.

We now have Configure Price Quote, or CPQ. We began to look at insurance and telecom operators. We felt that the product customization demand that we had seen in manufacturing over the past decade would be relevant and replicable in these two areas as well. We felt that customization would be a game-changer in those markets.

After stabilizing the company, we decided to make an investment in adapting our technology to market it to more service-oriented markets, ideally to make it easier for insurance and telecom to sell products which had more options and custom features to them. We were very customer-oriented in our sales approach. We redeveloped our technology from scratch.

Sramana: Had you validated that concept before you went into development? Were telecom operators looking for that type of customization offering?

Jacques Soumeillan: We looked very carefully at that aspect. We did our first validation with the insurance industry. We started with a small project in France, and we quickly realized that our intuition that these markets would soon be very hot for our solution was spot on. We decided to expand our development and sales to address the insurance vertical market.

Manufacturers sell products with defined options. When you are a telecom operator, you have to sell the hardware along with the various service plans. Sometimes you need to sell […] plans with upfront costs. It is a combination of products that becomes complex. That is definitely the case in insurance, where the case for a complete family is different from that for a single individual. Everything we had learned in the manufacturing space was extremely relevant for these two new industries.

For the past three years we have been addressing these new markets with great success. We have been able to enter into companies like Vodafone. They are the second-largest operator in Europe, and it is a huge product for us. Our technology is used, and the demonstration that our approach works has been validated.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building A Software Company From Toulouse, France: Jacques Soumeillan, CEO Of Cameleon Software
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