“I knew I had seen this guy somewhere…” was I wondering right from the start of the class. Indeed, take a look at this video interview by Jean-Michel Billaut, a French Internet-World videopodcaster & blogger, I had watched some time ago.
Jean-Louis Bénard is a prominent entrepreneur on the French Internet stage. Back in 1993, right after graduation from Ecole Centrale Paris, where I’m currently studying Information & Communication Technologies, Jean-Louis founded F.R.A., a B-to-B web service company, selling intranet / extranet / e-Commerce solutions to big corporate accounts. After growing from 1 to about 100 employees, the company was bought out in 2001 by Business Interactive, today one of the main players of Internet platforms (CRM, intranets, mobiles solutions, ad campaigns performance-tracking tools) and marketing (design, marketing, banners, affiliation programs). Jean-Louis remained at Business Interactive as a CTO for 2 years.
As every entrepreneur, he probably couldn’t stand not starting all over again. I guess Jean-Louis could feel 3 years in advance the video hype coming, so he started in 2003 an IPTV service aimed at empowering corporate accounts (like IBM: see SoftwareTV, unfortunately in French) with the appropriate tools enabling them to open personalized Web TVs, a great marketing and buzzing tool. The name of the company’s Brainsonic. Brainsonic pioneered the industry and still is the European leader today on the Web TV landscape although competition is getting tough all over Europe. Apparently, a strong emphasis is put on R&D at Brainsonic’s, innovation being a key-driver for customer satisfaction and the top line; namely, growth.
For roughly 3 hours, Jean-Louis Bénard explained to us his vision of where the world computer sciences might be heading to.
The main topics discussed were: history of computer architecture, middleware, design patterns, birth of the Web 2.0, and the promising swordfight between Microsoft’s .Net environment and IBM & Sun et alii’s J2EE platform.
And at last I could hear a sound argument against the sustainable spreading of AJAX technologies: overwhelming callback requests will eventually kill the technology.
Definitely one of the best IT lectures we have had so far. Jean-Louis, we know you are extremely busy, but keep on coming teaching at Centrale!
For the next few weeks, I’ll make sure I read more on some of the topics lectured (design patterns, Web 2.0 architecture, the future of e-Commerce interfaces) to write posts on this very blog. So keep your eyes opened.
