Interview for Club of François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva

#includeResource("Skel.ArticleHeader") François, can you describe your typical work day at Mandriva? When I don't travel, I leave home around 7 am, and because i ride a scooter, it takes me about 10 minutes to reach the office. Most Mandriva employees come in a bit later, France oblige, so this gives me time to read my mail, reply to most of it, look at our figures and read the professional press.

Between 9 and 10, my productive day ends and real life gets in. I usually attend too many meetings. I try to keep them short (we have some standing meetings for instance). I go through all the offices, and shake hands with everyone. At Aboukir, you are supposed every morning to shake hands with all men and kiss all women on both cheeks. I skip the kiss part, as part of our program to avoid sexual harassment suit, started by our Chairman, Jacques Le Marois. I manage the bad news when they come and deal with them one after the other. On a typical day, I meet Warly, who explains to me why we should give away more stuff, put more things in the Free Mandriva and do a new release every 3 months, I get calls from some shareholders asking me what the hell is going on, why aren't we raising revenue more quickly, I get e-mail from Gael telling me we should give away the Power Pack version to all the Linux magazines on earth to increase our distribution, I hold a conference call with the Brazilian team explaining why things aren't moving as fast as expected, I meet with other people who tell me we should change the strategy and the business model, I get back on my scooter to meet with a corporate customer, who wants to know why his project is not exactly on time, I hold meetings with the service people who tells me that they need to hire more consultants to do the job and with engineering who tells me I need to hire more developers to deliver the product, I will meet with the Employee Representatives who asks me when will we raise salaries and could they have more vacations. At the end of the afternoon, things quiet down and I have a bit of time to think and talk to people. I usually get home around eight, and my wife asks "hi François, how was your day?" and I say "pretty good, as usual!"

In your opinion, is the Ubuntu distribution a threat to Mandriva? Do you think Ubuntu's special circumstances make competition with it too hard?

We watch very carefully any new comer in the field and any new products. Three years ago I got a lot of calls about Knoppix, two years ago, I got a lot of calls about Gentoo and so no. Right now, the new "in thing" is Ubuntu. Of course, the situation is a bit different in this case: one person, with a quasi infinite check book is behind the operation. So they can give the system away and spend whatever is needed. Is this the right way for the open source eco-system? I find it hard to believe. One possible worse case scenario is that Ubuntu's plan is to use money to put all other community-based distros out of business and then start monetizing the installed base. If this were the case, they are doing the easy part: increasing their market share by giving away the product. We have found that the second part is a tad more difficult.

Of course, at Mandriva we do not have an infinite check book, so we need to work hard, we pay employee salaries with revenues generated by sales, we have to watch our figures, we have to keep happy our users, the community, our clients, our employees and our shareholders. It's a harder life, but I believe it is also a healthy way of looking at things. We work very hard, we can't pay high salaries, we have to make a living out of our revenue. By doing so, we are building a strong and healthy company based on a proven business model.

What can you tell us about new plans and projects at Mandriva? (takeovers, research projects, Mandriva 2007, etc.)

On the acquisition side, we clearly stated we want to be a key player in the consolidation of the market, we have done it with Edge IT in France and Conectiva in Brazil. By nature of the process, and because we're publicly traded, I cannot comment more on the ongoing projects.

We are working hard on Mandriva 2007, to make sure it is a major breakthrough in terms of technology. We are preparing something real cool for the release 4 of Corporate Server. We also have two major R&D projects starting : Nepomuk on semantic wikis and Energy on administration tools. We are also working hard on new special club distributions!

Do you have recent figures on Linux's growth in the professional market and in the mass market?

The figures are public and available to anyone. On the enterprise market, we see growth in the order of 25% and because we are new in that space we have grown much faster over the past 2 years. I was impressed by Intel's projection. Intel has a unit, named CSO focusing on the Linux desktop. Their working hypothesis is that by the end of the decade, 10% of Intel based desktops will be under Linux. This means roughly a bit more than one point every year: it's impressive.

What are the benefits for both big and small companies in switching to Mandriva on the server and the desktop?

I see many benefits, but the key drivers for migrations are (1) reducing costs (2) decreasing vendor locking. On the cost side, I am impressed at the thoroughness of the job done by CIOs who make the decision of a Linux migration. They understand TCO and they know a cost reduction when they see one.

What would you like to say to our Mandriva aficionados?

I want to thank all our customers for helping us and allowing us to grow this company.

And to those who only use the Free edition?

First of all, they should keep doing it, enjoying it and telling us how to improve it. Then, they should also have a look at our commercial services and products to see if there is something making sense to them.

What feedback and experience did your blog bring you?

I blogged a bit (one week) for VNunet (and in French only, I apologize). I actually liked the exercise, because I enjoy writing, however it is a very complicated exercise when you run a public company. On the second day of my blog, there was already comments on the stock exchange forum, interpreting my stories.

What are the strengths and the weaknesses of Mandriva?

The strengths of Mandriva are, in no particular order, the brand name, the installed base, the community, the quality of the technology and of the product, the global partnerships, the motivation of the team, the shareholders. On the weakness side, we are still too small and we need to grow both organically and internally.

What has changed in Mandriva with the takeovers of Conectiva and Edge-IT?

With Conectiva, we became truly global, we started speaking English with a Portugese and French accent, we got a new perspective on the world, we doubled in size and extended our portfolio of expertise. With Edge-IT, we got a highly professional team for corporate support.

Club subscriptions are fundamental for Mandriva and it seems they increase when Mandriva is having difficulties. What bad news could you announce? :D

That's a cute question and actually an interesting one. The club was initially designed as a mechanism to help Mandrakesoft when it was in trouble. When we started fixing the company, it became clear that we had to turn the club from a contribution raising tool into something that people would subscribe to get some real benefits. So we're working hard to turn the club into a great service. This seems more interesting that trying to generate bad news :)

If you chose to be like Linus and start an internet-wide flamewar, would you support KDE or GNOME? :)

My mother was a devout Catholic and my father a stern Protestant, I ended up being agnostic and plan to stay that way.

How do you manage always to be in a good mood?

First of all I love this job and this company, with all its pressure and excitement, and it's part of the job to be in a good mood.

We have to ask you our traditional question: what are you favorite web sites, your bookmarks?

the Mercury San Jose News, Libération, Information Week, Merriam-Webster, Google, and Mandriva.com of course (great site)

Finally, what message would you like to send to the Mandriva Club members, from the new subscribers to the founding members?

please continue to help us by telling us how we should improve, we are doing our very best to make this a useful and nice experience to users, we are currently working to add a lot of new key services on Club!


Thank you Francois for this interview.
scalpo