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 Luis
Talavera co-manages the development team at Talisma. He
spoke to Prashant L Rao in Bangalore about his role
at Talisma, how his experience at Talisma contrasts with his
earlier work at Microsoft, and what’s coming up in future
versions of Talisma.
Tell
us about your role at Talisma?
I
co-manage the development organisation. There are three vice-presidents
in charge of development activity at Talisma one of them an
ex Microsoft employee who report to me. The reason I came
aboard was that the Talisma team was such that I could pick
it up and drop it inside Redmond (Microsoft) and they would
be an awesome team there. I used to work with Pradeep Singh
(founder, Talisma) and was involved informally long before
I came on board in 1998. I work from Paris and chalk out the
strategy and direction which the product should take. You
can think of me a second conscience for the VPs. I visit Bangalore
four times a year.
How do you stay in touch with your team when you are located
in Paris and they in Bangalore?
E-mail
and phone. Eighty percent of the work happens over IM (MSN
Messenger). We chat, one-to-one or many-to-many. Occasionally
we use video conferencing or the phone.
What is the focus for the next version of Talisma?
Contact
Centres are the focus. We are enhancing features such as quick
Return on Investment, online request tracking and workflow.
Talisma is now a mid-market enterprise product. When we released
version 4 we saw the average sale value shoot up from $50,000
to $250,000. In Q1 we will roll out an enterprise portal feature
for Talisma. Other additions will be support for fault tolerance
and clustering. If you run two IIS (Internet Information Server,
the Web server that comes with Windows 2000/NT) servers if
one goes down the other will take over. We will be improving
scalability by moving jobs from the Talisma core to a separate
machine.
How do you compare yourself with, say, Siebel?
Siebel
isn’t looked at in a deal smaller than a million dollars.
We have won against them but not in the six to ten million
deals. Our competition comes from Pivotal and Onyx.
You worked at Microsoft. Can you tell us a bit about what
that was like?
At
Microsoft I worked on the R&D side. I worked on Pen Windows
handwriting recognition software. I ended up as director of
R&D. I led the SoftImage project from conception and definition
to the time it shipped to clients. We did everything except
for sales including the pre-launch marketing.
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