Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the case of Google, they have web self-service advertisement capabilities like Google CPC. If I, as a small business, want to advertise on Google, I can go to Google’s website and set it up to do that advertising. Do you have that in place as well?

Benoît l’Archevêque: Yes. We call that ad boosting. We can do product placement in site. We can actually increase or not, depending on the context of the search. Also, we do product re-targeting. For example, you have a blog. You would like to have contextual products offered in the article you were doing. We can actually place products beside the articles. We call that product re-targeting. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 4)

Benoît l’Archevêque: There are three revenue models in Azzimov: advertising when you search, the lead generation system that I just explained, and the affiliate model. When someone buys, there’s a percentage take off that. Put that aside. Take that business model, but apply it to mobile. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 3)

Benoît l’Archevêque: I’ll give you a very quick example. If I do a search on Italian, red, and car, you see a Ferrari. What we have created is a new dynamic knowledge graph where we only store words once. If I have 500,000 bottles of wine, I’m not going to store the word wine 500,000 times because I have 500,000 different bottles of wine. I will store wine once. I will store red once. I will store the words that are not common to create this other group of products. We were able to build a new way of structuring data. We can now take homogeneous and heterogeneous data and deconstruct and reconstruct in real time. For us, it’s a matter of seconds.

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Benoît l’Archevêque: It was in 1990. One Thursday morning, I lost my job. That noon, I said, “Nobody else will fire me again in my life.” So I started my own advertising agency that’s still running. People were coming to me with their problems thinking that only advertising could solve them. I was not just changing the advertising model; I was just changing the business model. If you’re not shouting the right message, you’re not going to get any more result just because you’re doing more advertising. It’s important to have the right business model.

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 1)

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We normally only feature companies that have proven concepts in the Entrepreneur Journeys series. This concept, however, is not entirely proven. It is interesting and bold.

Sramana Mitra: Benoit, where are you from? Where were you born and raised? Give us some back story of the Azzimov journey.

Benoît l’Archevêque: It’s a rather peculiar story because I’m a French Canadian. I come from a very low class family from Montreal, Canada. I was actually raised by a plumber and my mother was a Customs Officer – very creative people but not really much into businesses. I was surrounded by people that never really did anything to create a company. They’re not entrepreneurs. I come from a weird place where I didn’t know, at a young age, what an entrepreneur was. The only thing I wanted to do in life was cartoons. I studied Art. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic (Part 4)

Vance Loiselle: Right now, the approach being taken by most organizations is, “We know there’s data out here. Let’s just go solve it with maybe a big data project on Hadoop.” There’s a huge opportunity for organizations to go look at how they address specific verticals and solve specific vertical problems – whether it be in healthcare, retail, or manufacturing. All of those are huge untapped areas to provide solutions in leveraging data and analytics that can help those organizations. The more skills people have in a specific vertical, the more value you’re going to provide to that enterprise.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think we understand what you’re doing. What are the big trends you are seeing? I want a more granular perspective on the trends you are seeing in the space that you are primarily active in.

Vance Loiselle: Obviously, analytics, cloud, and big data are all big trends everybody’s talking about. If you peel back a layer, one of the things that you see is that the move to cloud has resulted in organizations basically having three approaches they need to take. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we take an example from each and really build on the use cases so we get a visceral feel of what specifically is going on.

Vance Loiselle: Let’s start with the second one first – media. Netflix is a customer of ours. They have a couple of big trends in the space. One is, they do a lot of stuff in the cloud. Two is, they have a lot of customers. Three is, their applications are growing rapidly. >>>