Enterprise search solutions on a roll 10 January, 2010 By Mark Cox

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The company, which is based in Quebec City, has been successfully expanding its' presence throughout North America and now globally. Coveo, recently announced the completion of its Series B financing for $8.2 million, which it will use to fund its ongoing expansion. The company plans to hire an additional 60 employees over the next two years and accelerate its product development.

Enterprise search, which covers all kinds of data within a company in different forms, has an increasing presence in any business that is knowledge driven. Coveo has over 600 implementations, many of which are in professional services, but their customers cover a broad gamut, including AmerisourceBergen, CA, Deloitte, GEICO, ESPN, Haley & Aldrich, Lockheed Martin, Odyssey America, P&G, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Rabobank, SNC-Lavalin, Spencer Stuart, Theodoor Gilissen Bankiers N.V., Children's Hospital of Boston, Sony Ericsson, Macquarie Bank, Patek Philippe, IMS Health, Nexen, ICBC, SSQ Financial, and the U.S. Navy.

"People become much more productive when they can leverage work that has already been done in an organization," said Fred Harding, SVP of Alliances at Coveo. "With enterprise search it takes a much shorter time to find a document."

Harding said that while enterprise search has been around for over a decade, it hasn't had a good adoption rate until the last few years.

"It's complex to index everything in a unified way, and thus difficult and expensive to make enterprise search work," he said. "But a new generation of companies, which includes Coveo, offer solutions which are more modular, scalable and easy to implement."

Coveo started five years ago as a spinoff of a desktop search company, with the key execs coming from there after Google introduced a free desktop search that changed the dynamics of that market very quickly. They started from scratch with the architecture, which Harding says now gives them a competitive advantage.

"Our architecture prohibits many of our competitors from doing what we do," he said. "Ours is newer, which leads to faster time to market, easier to use, easier to deploy. M any customers are surprised with how fast we can get an enterprise solution up and running. And because our architecture is agile, we tend to be quicker to market in release cycles."

Coveo is eager to leverage relationships and market presence of partners and has created a new entry level for its' partner program to facilitate that.

"One of the difficulties in bringing in new partners is the fees and training costs," Harding said. Our Friends of Coveo entry level took down a lot of those barriers. It's free, doesn't require any certification, partners can download the software and use it internally, and there is a library of previous webinars opened up for free on a self service basis. It lets us attract a wide number of potential partners who can learn at their own pace with few barriers."

This program also has the ability to drive a revenue stream as well. Partners can refer Coveo's Expresso free robust download search tool to customers.

"If the customer eventually purchases an upgrade (paid version), part of the fee goes back to the partner for referral. It's a way to monetize the partner base with a very agile tool. And there is very little administration because the download, billing and tech support are all done by Coveo. When a partner comes across a customer that's too big or complex for the free product, they can refer it as well."

The certified level above the Friends of Coveo typically handle the Coveo Enterprise Search solution.

"If a Friend of Coveo member wants to take next step, they sign up for next certification course, or for larger companies, with 6-12 people being certified, we may develop a certification course and come on site for them. Then after they are certified we work with them on a limited basis to develop ways to promote the product in their customer base. Our sales reps walk them through 'holding hands' in a break-in period of 3-6 months."

For partners who want even deeper specialization, there is a third tier, Advanced Solutions, requiring deep domain expertise.

"We want to grow our partner ecosystem aggressively. When we introduced Expresso last year, we realized how fast it could be taken to market. We want to aggressively grow Friends of Coveo and Expresso. From that as a foundation level, we anticipate some players will be well suited for the certification program. It's a great feeder into our certification program."

The certification program targets certain types of partners like Microsoft Gold partners.

"It's very complementary to what they offer. The low hanging fruit is with IT administration firms, Microsoft Gold partners, as well as Sitecore resellers. It's easy to go from Sitecore to Coveo Enterprise Search, add to what you are already doing."