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Eric Guilloteau, erstwhile Mr E-Business for BT and now CEO of Corizon, is a true renaissance man. Born in France, he made his move to London some years ago and went to work for BT, where a passion for starting new businesses led him to leave BT and set up Corizon - one amongst a small handful of successful British software start-ups, and a high flier in the Atlas Venture portfolio.
The company was founded as Genient Ltd in 2000, adopting the brand name Corizon in November 2003. It is privately held, backed by blue chip investors including Atlas Venture, RVC, LMS Capital and a number of private individuals including Mark Hoffman, founder of Commerce One and Sybase, Stratton Sclavos, president of VeriSign and John Devaney, chairman of Marconi plc.
Prior to founding Corizon, Eric was general manager of British Telecom’s eBusiness unit where he was responsible for establishing market leading initiatives in e-procurement and launching the first Trust seal in the UK with Trustwise, a certification authority in partnership with VeriSign.
He also launched the first European ASP allowing SMEs to rent online back office software from SAP. Prior to this, Eric ran the Mobility Solutions division for BT, and worked within Cellnet after leaving Visa in 1995. Eric has also served as a member of the UK government E-Commerce Task Force.
I asked Eric what made him decide to leave BT and start up on his own. “Prior to Corizon I spent most of my career in large organisations and big businesses,” he began. “I saw at these large companies that it was very difficult for IT teams to keep up with the new products and services that were being delivered to customers. Call centre agents were working with a myriad of applications and when we looked at trying to resolve their problems we saw there was a gap in the market and as a result we decided to set up Corizon.
“We started Corizon in 2000, which was at the end of the dotcom boom, but we put a plan and a team of expert developers together and we raised money from institutional investors and business angels and got the company off the ground. I led the efforts but there were some key players in the original team who are still with us, in particular David Davies, who runs our products and Edwin Van De Sanden, who runs engineering. There were four of us at the beginning and we put the proposition to business angels and investors, and then grew from there.”
It was this key team that Eric believes was pivotal to not just the foundation of Corizon but is fast track growth and continued development. “We might have this unique patented technology where we are differentiators but ultimately it is the people who made it a success,” he said. “When we started we identified two critical aspects that we needed to have in place. The first was a group of people who could work together and build a business and had the right balance of expertise in both technology and dealing with large clients; and second, a set of investors that understood what it would take to build a big company that we wanted to take public.
“This required institutional investors and also those who had experience in investing specifically in software companies both here and in the US. This meant they were experienced in both the boom times and also the more difficult markets. I also wanted access to entrepreneurs who had built companies - people like Mark Hoffman and Stratton Sclavos. I think they invested in us because they believed in the people and both myself and David had worked with Stratton and Mark for a long time and they understood our value proposition and saw that it had great potential.”
Eric doesn’t feel that getting investment from existing friends and business colleagues put any extra pressure on the company to be successful – rather he thinks that this gives all the people involved an extra impetus to make the company succeed.
“It is actually exciting as you have a vision that you are trying to make a reality,” he said. “I think we are a long way down that road, but we have a huge responsibility to our colleagues and ourselves and our customers to deliver our solutions. But what is amazing in this environment is that everyone in the business wants it to succeed. That is a fantastic aspect so although we have the responsibility we also have the excitement. It is a challenge but that is what excites us and that is why we chose to do this.”
Moving from a large organisation to a small start-up has been a complete culture change for Eric and his team, but he doesn’t think he could have made the move so successfully without the years of experience he gained working at BT and other blue-chip businesses. “What is interesting is that in the dotcom boom you have lots of people who wanted to start a business as they thought it was the new Eldorado, but they weren’t always the right person with the right expertise to do so,” he said.
“Large organisations are the people we sell to and work with, so having a good understanding of what they do was of paramount importance,” he continued. “But to me the fundamental difference between a small and large business is that we all have one objective and everybody is lined up to that objective. That is easy to do when you are a small company, but as the company grows so does the complexity as you start to have multiple objectives and a larger customer base, and the challenges change.”
As the company has grown Eric’s role has changed and the team has expanded to cope with the new workload as he explained. “I am less hands-on now than when there were just ten of us but this is one of the exciting aspects of a start-up - your job and the jobs of those around you evolve on a continual basis as the company grows.
“Managing this rapid growth is where we are really focusing, alongside adding new customers to our customer base. There is a danger that this could take some focus from existing customers, but we make sure that delivering superior service to them is a priority to us, as we are only as good as our customers say and see and so cannot take our attention away from that.”
This rapid growth and development has occurred during the worst recession in software, and this has left a legacy as Eric explained. “People used to buy technology based on hype and the promise of what it would do,” he said. “Now that many people have been burnt, they are more cautious and only buy when there is clear, demonstrable return on investment. This means the value you are creating has to be demonstrated step by step. This is a major change in the market and is here to stay.”
The fact that large companies have invested in so many different software programmes in the past is where Corizon’s value proposition comes into its own. “You have a multitude of applications and services, that are thrown at the end-user in a way that is probably not the most appropriate. Our systems isolate the user from this complexity and presents them with one screen that is designed to be most appropriate for them.”
Corizon’s Platform allows businesses to define, implement and monitor user activities across application boundaries. The result is that enterprise users can access multiple applications from one user interface created by re-using and re-combining existing user interface components. Corporations such as BT, Orange, Regus and Telewest already use Corizon technology in the UK.
“I will give you an example,” said Eric. “Put yourself in the shoes of a call centre agent who is taking a query. To identify what the problem is, that agent would have to look through an average of six to 12 different applications to find out the client’s name, address, system requirements and problem area. We call that swivel chair integration, so the user is compensating for the deficiency of the systems, by having to navigate through many different layers. We transform that completely, enabling the agent to work with what appears to him as just one system, defined for the needs of that particular agent, and the process that the agent is supporting. It simplifies and optimises the end-user’s experience while re-using all the existing applications and IT investments that have already been made by the company.”
Corizon is leading the field in this innovation, with its software creating the market. This means Eric is among the first to see trends emerging, and identified two key areas that he believed will be high on the agenda for CIOs next year. “There is a lot of change in technology but large environments still also have their legacy systems to deal with, so that is one of the challenges coming forward. You need to be able to deliver technology that will address clear pain points and do that in a way that deals with existing legacy systems,” he said. “Also, which I believe is more important, is the impact of the technology on the end-user. I think this will become one of the number one priorities of business.
“The companies that do consider the impact of more technology on the day to day job of those using it, and who then implement solutions to deal with the problem effectively, will be able to reduce costs and improve efficiency, which will allow them to deliver better service, so I think it is a critical area.”
Currently Corizon is focusing on the telecoms market – recent successes include a new software licence deal with British Telecom, initially worth £1.25 million over the next
12 months – but Eric has a global vision for the company: “We will continue to grow and deliver value to our customers and do that market by market. The core strategy will be to extend from our telecom focus today, to other verticals and then from other markets across to Europe and the United States. This product is new to the market and we believe that the possibilities of it are huge and they solve a large problem for businesses who have to interact with a large number of applications. Of course, this is a common issue in various markets, from call centres to finance departments, so I think that the market potential for the product itself is huge. Obviously as more and more people use it we will continue to enhance and develop it but our focus today is to get our UPM software more widely adopted, rather than add new products to our portfolio.”
Clearly driven by more than profits, Eric is in the enviable position of thoroughly enjoying his job. “You have to have passion,” he concluded. “You can’t do what we do if you don’t enjoy it, as it is a very intense and driven environment, but at the same time it is very exciting. We can literally see the huge impact our software has on end-users and I still find it very rewarding to witness that!”
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