Ask Jeeves Lures Execs

How do you get five executives from leading technology firms to jump ship and join your company?

That might be a good query to submit to Ask Jeeves, the Web's question-and-answer service for businesses and consumers. During the past three months, the company has lured VPs from established high-tech vendors, including PeopleSoft, Lotus, and Siebel, to help build Ask Jeeves's corporate offering--a Web-based natural-language query-response system for use in the finance, technology, and E-business markets.

Ask Jeeves has added these execs to its management team in the Corporate Question Answering Services division:

• Sean Murphy, a former PeopleSoft marketing VP, is now Ask Jeeves's marketing VP.
• John Ferraro, previously the senior VP of worldwide sales at Legato Systems, is now VP of sales for Ask Jeeves.
• Jeff Scheel, who is leaving his position as director of business development at Siebel Systems to become Ask Jeeves's VP of alliances. He will be responsible for building consulting and technology relationships with corporate customers.
• Paul Stroube, a former executive at Lotus Development and at consumer games vendor Knowledge Adventure, will be the VP of production, responsible for delivery of product to corporate clients.
• Alan Heitmann, previously director of consumer relations at Iomega, is now director of strategic corporate accounts for Ask Jeeves. He is charged with managing customer relationships and client-satisfaction programs.

So what attracted the five execs to the fledgling company? The uniqueness of Ask Jeeves's product, according to new marketing VP Murphy. "We all saw the opportunity to take the skills and experience that we've got and prove ourselves in a related arena that's in an earlier stage [of development]," he says. "We're used to helping grow organizations and making success happen, and here we're definitely in an opportunity to make that success happen."