Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If I understand it correctly, you have not only the indexers and the crawlers but also connectors to different systems like Salesforce that then allows you to bring all that together in contact.

Louis Tetu: You’re right. Obviously, you understand technology really well.

Sramana Mitra: I’m a computer scientist from MIT.

Louis Tetu: So we have essentially three things. We have the broadest set of connectors on the planet. While a lot of people went for search within specific apps, we took the switch route. Content will be fragmented. IT is trying to integrate systems at 50 miles per hour but legacy dies at 20 miles per hour. Cloud proliferates at 100 miles per hour. It is creating an ecosystem and is no longer a system of records. Coveo, early on, was one of the only ones out there who said the connectivity is key. Security is another key element. We’re the only indexer that not only indexes the records and the content but also the security. We bring the security in the index. That’s frankly the secret sauce.

The second block is we have a layer of software that we call the relevance engine, which essentially makes relevance and information mash-up fully configurable. It’s a language. We’re the only ones to have that. We can decide, within Salesforce, how information will be recommended, surfaced, and assembled together, given the context.

The third block of the Coveo platform is obviously the whole integration APIs and UI layer, which is all JavaScript. It allows you to basically very quickly drag and drop search base components within any app. While the world was talking about search within specific apps, we were quietly funding the development of what has become the most powerful end-to-end enterprise search platform. Today our strategy is to take that platform and package specific use cases around it within large ecosystems such as Microsoft and Salesforce. We’re the largest tech partner of Sitecore also.

Sramana Mitra: Do you sell direct or through the channel?

Louis Tetu: We sell both direct and through the channels. We sell within those channels pretty much direct and we have partners. You look at Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics. The issue that they have, especially at the high-end, is their ability to co-exist with legacy and new cloud sources. Tom Siebel in 1998 said, “CRM will contain the 360° view of a customer.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, having a consolidated view of anything whether it’s a project, product, person, customer, or case requires context, because your view of the same customer may be different from the one I want. It requires the ability to mash up information on the fly and do it in such a way that is cognizant of the context that you want. That’s what Coveo allows you to do. From that perspective, we’re pretty excited about the possibilities.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve chosen to do this company out of Quebec?

Louis Tetu: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about how that’s spanning out. Is it now easier to do a company of this scale out of Quebec?

Louis Tetu: I’ve always built my companies out of Quebec. The core R&D of Taleo is in Quebec City. There’s an Oracle building in Quebec city, which was the Taleo building. Quebec city is a very well-kept secret. Quebec has hardly any blue-collar employees. It has three large universities Laval itself has 47,000 students, mostly in science and computer science. There are a lot of research centers. It has a fairly low cost of living and fairly stable workforce, which is absolutely critical in R&D. Coming from Taleo, I understand the math of turnover probably more than most. Stability in R&D is extremely important because that’s your IP. We all know that the Canadian government provides huge incentives from an R&D perspective.

I would also say, that one of the advantages of Quebec city among others is that people are globally aware. For us, dealing with Europeans and multiple languages and culture is a natural. From a global perspective, that is very important. Partnerships is a key attribute of our culture. We’re not technocrats. We try to engage and partner with our customers and understand their needs. Our people travel quite a bit. There is some unique personality that we know how to take advantage of. For us, it’s a very good place to do business. I hop on a plane at 7 am on Monday and I land in San Francisco at 12. I can work the whole day. It’s pretty easy.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo
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