Startup Q&A: Joulica

Joulica provides a suite of cloud native products and services to Enterprise contact center customers globally. It specialises in providing realtime analytics solutions, working with technologies such as Kafka, Kubernetes and Cloudfoundry. Its technology solutions integrate with a wide variety of contact center platforms including Genesys, Avaya and Connect.

Tony McCormack, Joulica’s CEO, has built commercial relationships with Joulica’s existing customers which include Fortune 50 organisations and established partner agreements with global system integrators. He has a strong record of innovation and leading the strategy of global product portfolios and is the holder of over 70 US patents. Tony held leadership positions in Avaya where he had development responsibility for its next generation Contact Center portfolio. He holds a PhD from the University of Warwick.

— In a single sentence, what does Joulica do?

Joulica helps organisations upgrade their customer experience by orchestrating journeys across all their interaction channels using a rich set of realtime and predictive analytics.

– How did Joulica come to be? What was the problem you found and the ‘aha’ moment?

Prior to founding Joulica, it was evident to us that investments in omnichannel and cloud solutions were on the rise. We saw that the incumbent technology providers were not providing adequate innovation in the data analytics space to allow organisations to deliver omnichannel experiences they wanted. Our background and expertise was in this area, so we decided to give it a go!

— What sets Joulica apart in the market?

Joulica focuses on unifying data across channels and producing rich customer service and journey analytics in realtime. Other technology solutions either assume that a single vendor is used for all interaction channels or focusses on a historical reporting approach. These approaches have led to acute issues in the customer experience industry where lack of data analytics is cited as the biggest issue for customer service organisations. Our ability to operate across a mixture of on-premise and cloud solutions from multiple vendors and produce real-time actionable insights is unique in the industry.

— What are people most excited by when they first see Joulica?

We see the most excitement arising from our ability to accelerate the migration of on-premise Contact Centers to cloud solutions such as Connect. Contact Centers are typically sticky applications with deep integrations with the rest of the Enterprise application ecosystem. Our ability to maintain critical reporting and analytics data eases a lot of headaches. Following the cloud transition phase, our ability give organisations a unified view of customer interactions across previously siloed channels generates huge interest since it is one of the most common pain-points faced by business and IT leaders.

— Have you pursued funding and if so, what steps did you take?

We have been revenue generating since 2017 and have received substantial EU funding as part of the Enterprise Ireland High Performance Startup Unit.

— What KPIs are you tracking that you think will lead to revenue generation/growth?

We place a big emphasis on recurring revenue and strove early on to grow in a sustainable fashion backed by profitability. Being absolutely on top of the numbers and having a crystal clear way of articulating your value proposition remain the most important items for any investor meeting.

— How do you manage growth vs sustainability?

We focused very strongly in our first 2–3 years on growing in a sustainable fashion. We grew from 3 to 25 people in that time and still managed to build up a strong reserve which is obviously very important to us in the current climate.

— How do you build and develop talent?

We are very fortunate in that Galway has a vibrant tech scene and also is home to the leaders in our industry — Genesys, Avaya, Cisco and Aspect. We have been lucky to build out the team with a mixture of exceptional domain knowledge and cloud-native development skills. On the data science side, Galway has one of the largest data analytics research organisations in Europe which is also an excellent source of scarce and in-demand skills. Team members are always encouraged to broaden their skills and we give employees ample opportunities to attend local and global tech events.

— What are the biggest challenges for the team?

From a technical perspective, we have realised that delivering highly available cloud-native realtime solutions still requires deep engineering expertise, particularly in geographically distributed environments. The solutions we deliver must meet the most stringent criteria. It has always felt that we were on the bleeding edge!

— What’s been the biggest success for the team?

Building on the last point, introducing complex, cloud native solutions that integrate across a vast array of Enterprise applications into demanding Fortune 50 production environments has been a huge success and sense of pride for the team.

— What milestone are you most proud of so far?

Definitely, our first customer win stands out. Delivering our first solution to production in a mission critical environment still makes the team very proud.

— What advice would you give to other founders?

Joulica’s biggest strength is the team. Selecting the best team is the single most important job for a founder and needs deserves maximum attention.

— Have you been or are you part of a corporate startup program or accelerator? If so, which ones and what have been the benefits?

We are part of the Oracle for Startups and AWS Activate programs and both have been really beneficial. Both offer excellent cloud services as well as services and applications which are very complementary to the services we provide. This gives us an excellent opportunity to engage in delivering value to common customers.