Originally posted by Dazedandconfused
In the September webinar Mark Kehoe alerted us to the industry metric that the conversion rate of trials to contracts is 1 out of 5. A sensible person will park their expectations there. [MK expressed his opinion that FGO can do better than 1/5... if so , well and good] From here on it is simply a numbers game.... get in front of prospects, present and sign up trials.
It was EXL which approached FGO. In the video interview with Mike Toma [EXL's CTO and Senior Vice President] Mark Kehoe asks him why EXL chose Flamingo?... Answer.... "the thing that is going to win for companies in the AI space is really building purpose built solutions and Flamingo, I think, more than many other companies have really tailored AI and machine learning capabilities and the cognitive brain to very specific industry solution problems and that's what attracted us to Flamingo and where we feel we will be able to deliver more value to our clients"
The follow up question is ... And looking forward as we go to market, what do the next 6 months have in store for the 2 companies working together? Mike Toma answers it this way..."Our partnership has really started to take off... ... and together we are going after our joint clients and seeing a lot of potential activity"
So... EXL.... a US$4B company, with 800 clients... sees FGO as the means to deliver more value for its clients and is now embarked on a program of jointly presenting with FGO.
A bit of background on Mike Toma... he joined EXL in 2016 after spending 13 years with ADP [Automatic Data Processing... which had revenue of $12.3B in 2017]. His role was leading ADP's international product and technology organizations in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific regions.
https://www.exlservice.com/global-leadership
Any suggestion that FGO would somehow be better off establishing a client base on smaller Australian companies betrays sloppy research and completely fails to grasp the scale of the market potential.
Hi Dazedandconfused, Given the announcement today and your comments, I was wondering if you think the problems have only occurred in the last 6 months, given my comment in Oct 18 (which I still stand by) in which you were taking an opposite view to mine at the time. I respect your position to have a contra view to mine but I think your point of the company being opaque is now right on the money.
The wider question is whether there is any way of having better visibility to how a company operates?
My analysis was based on Cat public profile versus the company's profile in winning customers. I have found a lot of similarities between Cat's actions/profile and that of former CPA CEO Alex Malley. As a CPA member, paying $700 fees per year to an organisation only to see Alex promote "The Naked CEO" brand above the job he was paid to do @ CPA's annoyed the heck out of me. My bias against Cat was in part fueled by my previous bias against Alex M.
As for the future of FGO, I still don't think Insurance Sales channel is the correct fit for this product. What I do see as a huge untapped market is in the Knowledge Management space in say IT Help Desk. My previous organisation suffered greatly from not being able to have dynamic procedures that self learnt along the way. Documentation was always out of date and top management saw no value in keeping these static documents up to date. Instead they relied on individuals to remember "things" to just get the job done.
If FGO could implement an "AI" engine that could learn then document the procedures and report of successes/failures this would be a huge market to tap into.
(20min delay)