Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 1)

If you are passionate about the future of data-leveraged decision making, this discussion will be great for you!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with setting a bit of context. We have talked about your entrepreneurial journey. Set some context about Coveo.

Louis Tetu: Coveo is a player in a space called intelligent search. More specifically, we provide technologies for enterprises that essentially aim at delivering the best available information to every employee and every customer, every time. What that means for practical purposes is, we help companies engage their customers with more relevant information, and we help companies leverage their data so that they can upscale their workforce empowering people with richer information so that they can do more on their own. That’s really the essence of what we do. We’re a little more than 200 people and growing very fast. We operate across the three continents.

Sramana Mitra: Can you help us with an ecosystem map of Coveo’s space? Who are the players? What are the buckets and how do you position the company?

Louis Tetu: The traditional space is called enterprise search, predominantly because with many emerging markets, they all start with using a technical angle to things. Historically, the space has been called enterprise search. The traditional players in the space are anything from your basic level Google search appliance, all the way to an open source Solar.

I think where the space is evolving is, more importantly, using search not so much as a retrieval technology where you type a query and get a set of results, but rather using that technology in a more intelligent fashion to suggest the best available answer to any kind of question or problem, regardless of where that answer comes from. It’s the idea of being able to reach information wherever it resides across an enterprise, whether it’s on premise or cloud. It is also about being able to deliver a contextually relevant answer in a split second to an online customer or an employee working on a specific problem. We’re talking more of insight systems as opposed to search in the traditional way that consumers understand it.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take that insight concept and take us through maybe a few use cases. I recall that your customers are enterprise customers, yes?

Louis Tetu: Yes, we have north of a thousand installations across enterprise customers in areas such as high tech, banking, financial services, manufacturing, and a lot of others across the board.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a dominant vertical and are there dominant functional areas where your technology finds higher levels of adoption?

Louis Tetu: We methodically focus on four areas. Number one is customer service. Think about online communities and bringing more intelligence and richer information to customer communities so that customers can solve more complex issues on their own. The economics there is basically called deflection. That also tends to drive a lot of customer satisfaction. I’ll give you some examples of customers that do that. We’re also involved in customer service on the agent side, delivering contextually relevant information within agent consoles within contact centres so that agents can find answers more quickly to the problems matched against several cases. Customer service is a big area.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo
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