Interview with Gilles André, CEO of PolySpot

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Olivier MICHEL 

Finyear, a french Daily Journal for Financial Year Professionals published an interview with Gilles André, CEO of PolySpot.

You have recently announced that you have raised €2.5 million to boost the development of PolySpot. How do you explain this level of interest from investors in the current economic climate?

In any crisis, companies have to change to adapt to the new markets that emerge, and to make the most of the new rules that exist in an ever-stricter economic environment. A genuine “New Deal” is emerging in the IT sector, based on three key aspects: transparency, cost reduction and communities. PolySpot is fully engaged in this new movement, and that’s why investors are taking a close interest in our business model.

Can you explain what you mean by “transparency”?

Over the last few decades, IT managers have paid huge sums of money for licences, with deployment often taking several years. They have only come to realise the weaknesses of their purchases after making substantial investment. Would you be happy, for example, to buy a car if the owner refused to let you inspect the engine?
Transparency means that software developers are happy and willing to allow a wide number of people to access their software code, to openly share the strengths and weaknesses of their offers with their customers and partners, and to allow communities to use their software and give feedback without restrictions. In short, it means allowing our prospects to make a fully informed purchasing decision.

How can you maintain this transparent approach under all circumstances?

The open source movement is expanding at more than 20% per year, while the rest of the software market is in stagnation. This proves that customers aren’t necessarily looking for “free software with all its faults” that comes with open source, but are instead looking for greater transparency.

Doesn’t that make PolySpot an open source developer, though?

We have outlined a strategy that places us firmly within the open source movement. Our investors therefore saw a high-potential project that would remain unaffected by an unpredictable economic climate. With the growth of open source, many sectors that were once dominated by American companies are now led by French developers. These companies have enjoyed double- or even triple-digit growth since their foundation. PolySpot is in the perfect position to become the leading enterprise search infrastructure developer.

Is there really such high potential in the information access and search market?

The enterprise information search market is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the software industry. Recent takeovers – including HP’s takeover of Autonomy, Oracle’s takeover of Endeca and Dassault Systemes’ takeover of Exalead – have shown that search technologies are a key feature of the strategies of global software developers.
Over the next few years, we expect to see these technologies being used by the vast majority of small and medium-sized companies. Open source developers, with their “viral” marketing approach and unique economic model, are perfectly placed to become market leaders in this sector. That’s why PolySpot has managed to put everything in place in just three months.

You’re comparing your offer with companies that have substantially more resources than you. Isn’t that a bit unrealistic? How do you propose to challenge competitors with greater financial muscle than you?

As both investors and company directors, the most exciting aspect of this project lies in the fact that PolySpot has 10 years’ expertise in working with Apache components. The companies mentioned previously to use their own, proprietary technologies, whereas PolySpot bases its offer on market-standard technologies such as Lucene and Solr, which are used by major websites such as Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Twitter.

How, then, does PolySpot add value to these technologies?

Apache technologies are not products in their own right. They are components that need to be modified and adapted to minimise deployment and maintenance costs. Our solutions can be deployed ten times faster than when these components are used directly.
PolySpot also offers information access and information enrichment modules, along with ready-to-use applications.

The market is already fully aware of the value that we add to these technologies, and of our added value in relation to our competitors. With growth of almost 100% in 2011, PolySpot’s gamble is clearly paying off.

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