Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is this SI a Latin American SI?

Benjamin Mestrallet: Yes.

SM: So in Latin America you have been able to get the SI deals as well?

BM: Yes, but it was them contacting us. This one is unusual, but it happened like that.

SM: And the structure is the same? They build a product, there is a support built in, and you get paid for the support for your portion?

BM: Yes, that is exactly how it works. They have around 15 projects in the bank based on our platform. The world we come from is the enterprise platform. It needs a project with a lot of integration. So the sales and implementation cycles are quite long. Big budgets are involved, so if you win, you make a lot of money. To get to that point takes a lot of time and energy. We wanted to re-architect that so we could market a much simpler message with a product that will be first used out of the box and then customized.

The idea was to change the entire sales process, having people go and try the product, use the product, start to pay for it, and then pay more and more depending on the user and the product. That is what we did. Actually, there were two things we did. First we found a good strategy that was a bit different. Our positioning is very simple. We are the open source alternative to Jive software, and we position ourselves as an open source enterprise social platform. If you look at the market, there is no alternative to Jive right now as an open source player. If you take all the other markets, there is always one well-identified open source vendor that can compete. That was our message as we went to market. It is very important to find a simple message that people can rely on.

SM: And finding a comparable that is already established on the market is also very helpful.

BM: Yes. The open source strategy is great because it is like a marketing tool that generates leads.

SM: Since you are talking about Jive; Jive doesn’t position itself as an enterprise platform. It positions itself as an enterprise social media platform. How do you think about that?

BM: Its position depends on how it is used. Our customers that use Jive use it for social intranet – connecting their employees internally.

SM: Which means that it is a competitor to Yammer.

BM: It is, although Yammer was mainly an online solution before the acquisition through Microsoft, while Jive mainly comes from the on-prem[ises] world. This means that the category of enterprises that uses Jive is different from the one that uses Yammer. The enterprises that use Jive are larger and more serious than the ones who use Yammer.

SM: Part of the problem is that before the acquisition you needed to have an account on Yammer. That is not what enterprises want.

BM: Some of them want on-prem, some of them want public cloud, and some of them want hybrid cloud. That is why I think Jive is better than Yammer in that sense. They are also in the Java world. As soon as it comes to platform play, the CTO and CEO have a word to say, whereas if you take a pure SaaS offering, it is much more the business unit that drives the adoption. Let’s say you take a business unit on the marketing side and they start to use it. When it becomes big, they want to internalize it, and then it involves the CTO. With Yammer, you can’t customize it much.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux - Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo
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