Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say we have a customer support representative who’s answering a call and looking at the knowledge base to look for information, what does that customer support agent find in your system that he would not find through a RightNow system?

Louis Tetu: I’ll give you a practical example. Let’s take GoPro cameras who we work with. In their contact centres, they use Salesforce Service Cloud that has a knowledge base. Presumably, they should deliver the answer. The reality is that what Coveo brings in the GoPro console is aggregation of content from other sources like Confluence.

We will even index a YouTube channel because the agent has to see what the customer sees. We’ll index the entirety of Salesforce.com to find answers and matching cases anywhere. We’ll suggest content based on a number of factors. We look at all the metadata around the case. We look at the text analytics of how the customer describes the case. We’re looking at very advanced suggestions from many sources that we bring to the agents, straight in that console. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 2)

Louis Tetu: Marketing is also a dominant functional area. We do a lot of work around CMS or web content management in delivering, more so than search, intelligent search using, in that case, machine learning and crowd analytics to deliver better relevance. We’re involved in areas such as sales to consolidate customer information within CRM. All these three are really around customer engagement, so to speak.

We’re also involved internally with the digital workplace space. Think about the next generation intranet that is far more intelligent in terms of being able to reach out everywhere in the enterprise as opposed to your traditional SharePoint. We’re able to reach out across the enterprise and make suggestions—recommending people and content. We’re involved with intranet and help desk. In general, sort of reengineering knowledge management and collaboration around data analytics. Those really are the four areas. >>>

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. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You shouldn’t be selling through as a technology platform. It sounds like you have a set of disjointed stuff and you’re basically doing custom solutions in various areas that are quite diverse from IT, marketing, to supply chain. I’m trying to understand the organising principle of the company.

Ravi Reddy: The organising principle of the company is to help customers with digital strategy.

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically running a consulting and custom software company.

Ravi Reddy: We are trying to transform over the last 18 months from a pure consulting company to a platform company. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 3)

Ravi Reddy: Our product has enabled Orient, for example, to know, in real-time, how much inventory is in its supply chain. It can do supply chain inventory optimisation through supply chain visibility, which is real-time. Since we have the product information, we’re able to push this product virtually into all omni-channels. Orient never had its own e-commerce and could never put all its products in different marketplaces. Orient is now able to put on amazon.com.

In the case of Gulf Oil, we were able to protect them from territorial integrity. Distributors were smuggling oil across the border. That’s what we call territorial integrity. Today, there’s a YouTube video which says that the Gulf differentiates itself from the rest of the oil companies by saying, “We partner with E-Feel to protect our distributors from cross-border transactions.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why didn’t you introduce your company as a cloud-based testing company instead of all this digitization mumbo jumbo?

Ravi Reddy: Good question. We have four different solutions. Two of those are IT, one of those is cloud tester, and the other is called DevOps Express. Those are two solutions that are cloud-based. One is for integration automation. The other one is for testing automation. For the two business solutions, one is supply chain digitalization. The other solution is marketing digitalization. 

Sramana Mitra: I understand cloud testing as a service, integration as a service, and DevOps. We get into the realm of not understanding what you mean by supply chain digitalization and marketing digitalization. Those are complex business functions in themselves. I’d like to understand in each case what is the value that you bring to the table.

You can take any example from your customer base. Let’s do a use case on your supply chain digitization and one case in marketing digitization. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 1)

We’ve discussed the vertical cloud trend in previous interviews. This discussion highlights the same trend, but from an entirely different point of view.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Sunera.

Ravi Reddy: Sunera Technologies is uniquely positioned in the way that we are helping organisations in digitalization of information technology and digitalization of business. A large number of our solutions and platforms are built on cloud for one to automate, predict IT applications and IT systems such that organisations can drive more productivity from their investments in IT and invest more in creating new business models that are evolving through digitalisation. That’s the core of Sunera.

Sramana Mitra: You need to walk us through some customer use cases. Tell us what kinds of customers you work with and walk us through how you add value to that process. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Pete Manca, CEO of Egenera (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your business is to provide the full stack that would enable value-added resellers to offer public cloud solution on top of your platform.

Pete Manca: Right. What we do is we partner with Equinix for data centres around the world. We have clouds located in the US, the EMEA region, and also in the Asia Pacific region. We provide the hardware, software, and the people to manage the cloud. It’s a full suite of hardware, software, and services that we offer to the reseller channel. They can take those with no money down. It’s a pay-as-you-go model. They can take those cloud resources, rebrand it as if it’s their own to sell to their end users.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the cloud market operates in this mode? If you look at cloud market shares, how much is in this buckets of third-party cloud solutions?

Pete Manca: Amazon dominates the cloud market today. I don’t know the exact numbers today but it’s probably 80% of the market. Microsoft probably has 15%. Those two vendors dominate the market today. However, we are seeing a real trend towards resellers and VARs who want to make more money. Our business is growing as a result. We’re seeing more gravitation towards this type of model. >>>