Q&A with Darrell Gunter of Collexis
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Item

"In our area, we deal with technology transfer departments and the Director of Research. We find that they have funding to support solutions that will help them identify and maximise ROI on a particular project or go after a particular research grant."

During April's Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, VIP Magazine had an opportunity to speak with publishers, intermediaries and content buyers. A series of brief interviews explore innovation in the content market and how publishers are working to meet the needs of today's enterprise content buyers.

Darrell Gunter is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Collexis, a company providing enterprise search, document discovery and knowledge management software. Mr. Gunter is responsible for the corporate strategy, business development and marketing to support the company's strategic objectives. Previously, he was the Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing for the Americas for Elsevier. He led the development and growth of Elsevier's first commercial sales organization and managing the transition from print to ScienceDirect. Prior to Elsevier he worked for Dow Jones Financial News Services and served as the National Sales Director. He began his career in sales at Xerox Corporation. He received his Business Degree from Seton Hall University and his MBA from Lake Forrest Graduate School of Management.

VIP: I spent some time looking again through the Collexis website and some of the coverage of the company in the industry literature. It looks as if the core of the technology was developed in bioscience.

DG: Life Science, yes that's correct.

VIP: And you've expanded through development and acquisition to test some of these other areas like legal and government

DG: Yes.

VIP: The legal and government audiences are both central to VIP's own strategy.

The government field seems particularly appropriate for your solution because they have to deal with so many different types of documents and formats. Yet the proverbial red tape probably makes the sales cycle very lengthy for you, with many different decision makers involved. Could you talk a little bit about how you work with government customers to help them build a business case internally for your solution?

DG: Within the government arena, we're very fortunate to have a reseller partner in Lockheed. Collexis' technology is demonstrated at Lockheed's Center For Innovation, which means we are one of their featured vendors. Often we will be part of their response to an RFP along with maybe five or six other vendors that they pull together and they have the necessary security clearance, so they manage the project from proposal through implementation.

VIP: That works pretty well, if you can find the right partner for that sort of thing. Do you have similar arrangements with companies that meet the needs of non-US governments?

DG: That's our main government relationship right now. We do have another partnership with Altum, Inc., which is focused on research grants management, to provide a full range of services to the life sciences field, and we're developing other partnerships to meet the needs of, for example, the financial markets, which require a similar range of solutions.

VIP: Where do you see your biggest potential in 2009 being? What do you really have your eye on for growth and expansion?

DG: Life Sciences remain a critical area for us, and we're really going to continue to focus there. Recent launches include the Collexis Expert Profiling System, the Reviewer Finder, and the Collexis Expert Platform for Translational Science which is for researchers who participate in the NIH's Clinical and Translational Science Awards. Basically what it means if you have the institutional version of the Collexis Expert Profiles, you will automatically gain access to the database of 44 institutions that are participating in the National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Awards.

VIP: We've been hearing a lot in the last day and a half about the tensions of reduced budgets and the needing to provide a higher level of service or work with your customers to determine the right level of service for what their new budget is. How is that playing out in some of your relationships?

DG: In our area, we deal with technology transfer departments and the Director of Research. We find that they have funding to support solutions that will help them identify and maximise ROI on a particular project or go after a particular research grant.

VIP: So places they can see a really close connection between the software investment and the return.

DG: Exactly. If you look at the traditional library budgets, yes, if we were selling in that area, I would be very, very concerned. I'm still concerned, but I would be even more concerned.

VIP: Looking at the legal industry, in a lot of ways it is a small town industry that builds on one-to-one personal relationships and it looks as if you're making efforts to bring that small town more firmly online through your social networking applications. How successful has that been for you? Since you're working with a student population in those areas, do you find that those digital natives are taking this up much more easily than, say, senior partners?

DG: Yes, of course. The students are utilising Casemaker X simply because we're positioning and promoting jobs that the senior firms are looking to fill with these folks. There is a natural partnership between the Bar association, the law firms and the students, and we're just providing the platform. Casemaker X is a gateway for them to communicate more effectively.

VIP: Do you think that that model has applications in other industries?

DG: It should. I think that when you look at students in a particular area and they want to move into a particular field, I think, yes, it's very natural to provide platforms that smooth the pathway.

VIP: It seems to fit really nicely though with the culture of the legal industry of very personal networking, personal relationships kind of approach.

DG: If you're a Bar association you want to recruit new members and if you're a law firm, of course you want to try and find the best talent. The top talent goes very fast. So you have to find the quickest and most compelling way to do so. And for the students it connects them into their professions, so it's a win-win for everybody.

VIP: Our primary audiences are decision makers in multi-national organisations in key industries. A lot of times the core decision-making teams are based in London or the United Kingdom or in Europe but they have global sites. Sometimes they are very cautious about working with yet another American company. Are there ways that you would put them at their ease that they were talking with you?

DG: Collexis started off as a European company with our roots based in an EU project that developed the original Collexis technology for developing countries that needed to search the internet for very specific regional diseases. In addition our development team is in Germany. We also have a partnership with Legal Intelligence, which is a legal publisher based on The Netherlands. With all of these European roots, I am sure that folks in the Europe would be comfortable to do business with us.

VIP: So you are just as international as they are.

DG: Exactly.

« Blog