Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 3)

Sramana: What type of person applies to work in your virtual call centers? Maynard Webb: The quality of agent you get is far higher in general because we are sourcing from the entire country versus a constrained region. We have more college-educated folks than call centers anywhere else, but they also work different hours than

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Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 2)

Sramana: How much of the current offering did LiveOps have in place when you joined? Maynard Webb: We did not call anything the cloud back then. We started selling our technology right before I joined. The biggest part of the business was the agent business.

Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 1)

Maynard Webb is the chairman and CEO of LiveOps, which delivers an on-demand contact center platform as well as call center outsourcing services. Prior to LiveOps he was the Chief Operating Officer of eBay where he directed engineering and technology operations, product development, customer support, trust and safety, global billing, human resources, and legal functions.

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Building A Software Company From Toulouse, France: Jacques Soumeillan, CEO Of Cameleon Software (Part 7)

Sramana: Of all the competitors you started out against, it looks as though Selectica is the only one still around. Do you run into them in the marketplace often? Jacques Soumeillan: They don’t have very many customers now. We are looking for some business that they had prior, but we have new competitors now such

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Building A Software Company From Toulouse, France: Jacques Soumeillan, CEO Of Cameleon Software (Part 6)

Sramana: Has the manufacturing business come back? Are you getting sales from the manufacturing companies? Jacques Soumeillan: The manufacturing business is still there. We like to keep our existing customers. We are still developing and improving that product. It is our core knowledge, and we will continue to focus on it.

Building A Software Company From Toulouse, France: Jacques Soumeillan, CEO Of Cameleon Software (Part 5)

Sramana: Did your business stabilize completely around 2004? Jacques Soumeillan: Absolutely. At that time we decided that since we had reduced our workforce from 200 worldwide to 70, we really had to know what our next steps would be. In 2005, we decided to reinvent ourselves a bit.

Building A Software Company From Toulouse, France: Jacques Soumeillan, CEO Of Cameleon Software (Part 4)

Sramana: Tell me more about your decision to take the company public toward the end of the 1990s. Jacques Soumeillan: It was just before the bubble, and I know that some of our U.S.-based competitors went public. They were not much bigger than we were, they had perhaps $20 million in revenue. We went public

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Building A Software Company From Toulouse, France: Jacques Soumeillan, CEO Of Cameleon Software (Part 3)

Sramana: What were you charging initially for your per-seat user license? Jacques Soumeillan: It was around €2,000 per user. We were able to develop a strong business on that model. We started some international enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors outside of France primarily because of that success. Our international work started in Montreal and Chicago.

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