Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 2)

Louis Tetu: Marketing is also a dominant functional area. We do a lot of work around CMS or web content management in delivering, more so than search, intelligent search using, in that case, machine learning and crowd analytics to deliver better relevance. We’re involved in areas such as sales to consolidate customer information within CRM. All these three are really around customer engagement, so to speak.

We’re also involved internally with the digital workplace space. Think about the next generation intranet that is far more intelligent in terms of being able to reach out everywhere in the enterprise as opposed to your traditional SharePoint. We’re able to reach out across the enterprise and make suggestions—recommending people and content. We’re involved with intranet and help desk. In general, sort of reengineering knowledge management and collaboration around data analytics. Those really are the four areas.
The dominant vertical for us has been high tech. We lead the high tech sector with customers such as Salesforce, Logitech, Adobe, VMWare, and Informatica. That has always been a huge vertical for us. In that case, we power intelligent customer communities globally. We’re also quite active in manufacturing where, again, everything that deals with customers and intranet, similar to Honeywell or Dow. Further, we are active in financial services too. Those would be banks and insurance companies.

The exciting aspect of this new type of technology—it’s not only Coveo here—is that aggregating data and delivering intelligence can really translate into huge economics, not only in terms of sales conversions as we see when Amazon makes intelligent recommendations, but really driving customer engagement and enabling greater productivity and enabling people to do more on their own by giving them richer information. There’s huge productivity gains. That’s the heart of what we do.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you one specific question. You can use a use case to illustrate your response. How do you differ from a RightNow that also does customer support knowledge bases in terms of your insight management? RightNow is a bit older technology. What has happened in the last decade that’s different and advanced?

Louis Tetu: As you know, I’m pretty familiar with RightNow. I was involved with Oracle and Taleo. We grew simultaneously in the space. In general, what we’re seeing is that we’re witnessing a layer of software that is no longer a single system of record. The idea of indexing is that suddenly, the fundamental concept is that knowledge is no longer residing in a single set of systems of record.

Knowledge is ambient. Knowledge can be everywhere. Indexing allows you to capture the best available information, regardless of source. The power of software to now crawl securely and reach data wherever it resides and deliver, not only that data on demand, but intelligent mashups that are contextually relevant on demand is extremely powerful. The main difference is you’re agnostic from the source. RightNow, Confluence, and Salesforce become channels of information that you can aggregate on the fly and bring into a Salesforce console or a Sitecore website as the key system of engagement. That’s the idea here.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo
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