Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What could you do that IBM couldn’t do?

Felix Van de Maele: That goes back to the original story. The authenticity there is in focusing on business people. We always focus on business people. The product is very easy to use, collaborative, and social. We adopted some concepts from Wiki. The user interface was very friendly.

That’s very different from the incumbents who’ve always been selling IT-focused tools where the focus is not on collaboration but on a single developer doing something. That’s a fundamentally different type of product. You could say, “A business glossary is not that complex.” Actually, it’s not an easy problem. The typical software companies that are focusing on data management weren’t used to creating these types of products.

Sramana Mitra: You figured all these things out while you were selling to NetApp. What did you do with that knowledge in the next phase of the sales cycle?

Felix Van de Maele: We continued to iterate on our process and our product. We came out with Version 4. At that time, we started to grow pretty quickly. Starting from 2012, we started to triple every year. We went from $1 million to $4 million to $12 million. We were starting to be seen as a thought leader in that emerging category. We had great relationships with analysts and other thought leaders as well who were pleased that, finally, there was a product on the market that focused on the business use case.

With that feedback, we started to expand those use cases to what is now called data stewardship and data governance in general. What we’ve seen over the past 5 to 10 years is that, data has fundamentally changed. When we started, nobody really cared that much about data. Now, it’s completely different. The volume and complexity of data has exploded and you have these Big Data and NoSQL technologies to cope with that complexity. Also, the importance of data has grown very rapidly with the trend of the whole self-service BI.

The analysts now want to work with data themselves instead of relying on IT to do that. It’s a fundamental shift from IT to the business, which is exactly what we are doing as well. What that has led to is there is a lot of chaos around data. Right now, everybody believes that data is the competitive advantage. It’s how you build better products, better services, and better customer success. You have data science. You need to build these data warehouses and Big Data platforms. The amount of people involved in data has grown incredibly. There’s no process to support, which is a real problem.

It’s similar to what you saw 15 to 20 years ago around IT where IT was the big competitive differentiator. Everybody wanted to do IT and automation. That led to chaos as well, which led to IT governance and IT service management. What we are doing right now is actually very similar – help people collaborate around data. That platform really started to expand beyond business glossary based on that feedback and the maturing of the market.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra
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