Eloquent Narrows its Enterprise Focus
Eloquent (www.eloquent.com) has been concentrating on the Enterprise communications market since the company launched, but found that its initial flagship product, the ECS server, was too broad in its focus, according to Cliff Reid, CEO of Eloquent. Reid states that while Eloquent was successful in acquiring early-adopters as customers, more customers were simply not following.
"We had done about $40 million of cumulative revenue with Fortune 1000 companies, and $20 million of the revenue was in product launches. It was in product launches that customers felt they had immediate ROI," says Reid.
In order to better serve this portion of the market, Eloquent has introduced a new product called Eloquent LaunchForce.
LaunchForce primarily represents a change in focus for the company and utilizes much of the same technology as the ECS server, which Reid says has virtually disappeared from Eloquent's product line.
LaunchForce manages an entire product launch, enabling organizations to deliver clear, consistent messages through interactive presentations that incorporate video, audio, slides, demos, text and Q&A sessions. Eloquent is focusing its sales efforts solely on marketing departments.
"Two forces are colliding in today's economy; marketing budgets are being slashed and at the same time, there is a need for quick generation of revenue from new products," said Elizabeth Sun, senior program director, Electronic Business Strategies, Meta Group.
Reid states LaunchForce offers features not previously available, including the ability to scale to a live audience of up to 10,000 people.
LaunchForce also tackled certain psychological issues. For example, arriving late to a webcast is very commonplace because the speaker cannot see you. To remedy this situation, Eloquent added the ability to pause throughout and the ability to start the presentation from the beginning if one arrives late.
Reid dubbed this technology "web tivo" and says that Eloquent has filed for a patent on its system because it uses server side caching, instead of the more typical client-side cache.
Eloquent also found that people are more comfortable asking questions verbally rather then typing them in to a "chat" type Q&A sessions, so it built in a service that allows a scalable voice mail-type system to be used to field questions for the speaker in real-time.
Microsoft and Eloquent are maintaining their relationship, and Reid adds that it is working with Microsoft to integrate Launchforce and Microsoft Windows Media Producer, an editing tool for creating WM synchronized, with slides expected to come out later this year.
"Microsoft has a very ambitious strategy of delivering to their enterprise customers, a rich media content management system. One of the key pieces is our piece, and we expect for our technology to be an integral part of their suit," adds Reid.