Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So you compete with Jive?

Benjamin Mestrallet: Yes. But we have features that compete with Yammer or others.

SM: So you do have full social media capability now?

BM: We have 80% of the features you can find on Jive.

SM: If I want to set up a social network for my company, we could use your platform to set up this network?

BM: Yes, and you can use it on our platform, or you can install it. You have several options there: We have a premium option with an unlimited number of users, or you can take the open source version and install it on your servers. You can also have an online commercial version, which is $3 per user per month, or an onsite version.

SM: If an enterprise decides to go with you, it is a substantially cheaper option than Jive.

BM: Yes. Their approach is different from the one of Yammer. Our online cloud option is much closer to the Yammer pricing model than Jive. Jive has a 30-day trial, and there is no premium at all online. Then it is quite expensive. Yammer has a premium, and per user it is also $3. We use the cloud version as a means for two goals. One is to convert some of them to the online version. The other is to have an easy trial of the platform. People don´t want to download things. They want to try it quickly. I think that the newer versions of software that win are the one that have easy and simple access. If you go to the eXo platform, it only requires one click to access the platform. If you like it, you can go further, but at least you quickly see if you like it or not.

SM: You talked about a bunch of large system integrators in Latin America and Europe that are building large projects on top of your platform. Do you also have smaller companies building on top of your platform?

BM: Yes. The new version that started in April is also intended to target smaller companies. We want to increase the number of transactions and make the average deal size smaller. Usually people want to make it the other way around. We see all those smaller companies starting to do interesting things and contributing to the platform. The SIs we took before are mainly developing solutions for end user customers.

We have seen two new trends that we didn’t really expect in the beginning. One is ISVs and the other is service providers and Telcos. In the ISV sector, there are lots of companies that work on logistics, HR, ERPs, etc. Now they see pressure from competition like Salesforce.com, for example, to bring social as part of their product. Also, they want to focus more on business logistics. So they ask, “How can I bring social to my software?” They have a build or buy option. We see a lot of them come to us. They borrow the framework from us – it is an OEM in a way – and they pay us royalties for that. The other trend we see are telco and service providers. It started in Europe. In Europe the telco and service providers are basically the same companies. What they all realize is that they all have an enterprise division. They have thousands of customers and every year they have to introduce new products to their customers.

These days the trend is to bring an enterprise social network to those customers – either on-prem for large customers or online. So they saw our solution, which is open source, that you can have online. They came to us and said, “We would like to distribute our software to our customers as a white label.” Recently we signed the first big one in Europe. When we define that correctly, we will do an offering and try to also target service providers in the U.S. That is very interesting.

SM: What about small software companies that build functionalities that need social media? Are you seeing traction from those?

BM: The community version was launched in April, so it is new. We are seeing a lot of use in the open source version. There are lots of questions on the forums as well. That means that some of them really use it. But the ones who have contacted us to get professional support are mid-sized companies.

SM: Right now we don´t have a social network. We work with more than 100,000 entrepreneurs around the world, and we get in touch with them through other social networks. We are very active on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Quora. We are active on about 10 social networks. 1M/1M does not have a social network on its site. It is something that really makes sense doing in the future, but it is something we are not going to build from scratch. Yammer is not an option, because we would have to put it on their brand.

BM: We could probably rewrite the Yammer stuff on your own domain. In our case you could use the online version or the open source version on your own servers and customize everything as you wish. We try to provide a lot of customization, even in the online version. But the more you bring it onto your own servers, the more flexibility you have.

This segment is part 5 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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