Bernard Liautaud, the founder and, until recently, chief executive of French software company Business Objects, is in a very exclusive club. Business Objects is one of just a handful of European companies that has broken through the $1 billion (€851.57 million) annual revenue mark to rank among the 25 largest software companies in the world.

SAP and Sage have also gate-crashed that US-dominated club and were there before Business Objects. However, Liautaud's achievement is all the more remarkable because he was chief executive from 1990 - when the company was founded in Paris - until last September, when John Schwarz, the former president of security software firm Symantec, took over the reins.

With the local software industry asking why Irish companies cannot seem to scale past $40-$50 million in annual revenues, what is the secret of Liautaud's success?

"There is a bit of luck definitely, in fact a lot of luck in everything, to build a company from where we started to a billion," he says modestly.

While that may be the case, the company also made a number of astute decisions along the way which helped it outgrow its French base. In 1991, just a year after it was founded, it had an office in Menlo Park, home to Silicon Valley's venture capital business. Six months earlier, when it secured its first round of external financing, Business Objects attracted US investment, including some of the venture capitalists that had backed the likes of Intel and Oracle.

Liautaud himself relocated to California, although he has since returned to Paris with his wife and five children, and hired US senior management in areas such as marketing and finance. The latter was particularly important in advance of the company's 1994 Nasdaq floatation - becoming the first European company to list on the tech-heavy exchange.

"We wanted to shape the business so that, from the beginning, it was an international company - it wasn't just a French company that five years later would think about how we are going to get the business into the US," he says.

Business Objects developed a symbiotic relationship with Liautaud's former employer Oracle, where he had held the position of marketing manager in France.

For the first two years, its products worked exclusively with Oracle's database, meaning Oracle was happy to introduce the young company to its key accounts. "Oracle was clearly the number one player and kept being the dominant player in databases," says Liautaud. "If we had bet all our money on Informix or Sybase, we would be in different shape."

Business Objects operates in business intelligence software, and it is the market leader in the space since its 2003 acquisition of its main competitor Crystal Decisions. Although the field is evolving rapidly to encompass new areas, business intelligence is about taking information from other applications and databases and running reports on that data so that meaningful trends can be identified.

The market for business intelligence software is growing and, according to Liautaud, it is now one of the three priorities for chief information officers and IT managers. In the near future, he believes business intelligence will become as ubiquitous as Excel or Word: "It will be expected that as part of work environment you will have an information consumption solution."

It is not surprising, then, that the big software players such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are looking to muscle into the market.

"The business intelligence industry is growing at an extremely healthy rate," says Liautaud. "The business drivers are very strong - reducing cost, managing performance better, compliance. It's a very attractive piece of the enterprise software market, so it's natural that the large companies in software are trying to make a play into it.

"The issue with companies like SAP or Microsoft trying to get into our business is that the key criteria for being successful in business intelligence is independence across multiple systems, multiple data sources and multiple applications. Most of these companies, their core business is in one of these areas."

Liautaud was in Dublin this week for the opening of the company's European operations centre in Dublin's Park West. It employs 100 staff from 12 European countries, although with 24,600 sq ft of office space in two buildings, it clearly has significant expansion plans.

Unlike many US companies that set up European headquarters in Ireland, Business Objects already has a strong European business that has grown organically in each of the markets. By centralising and rationalising processes around distribution, maintenance, finance and order management, it hopes to make significant savings.

"There is a lot of different places you could do that - you could do it in the UK and in Paris, but Ireland came as a fairly natural choice for us," explains Liautaud. "There is a great talent base here. In terms of creating an attractive central organisation, Ireland is very appealing to young people. The tax is part of the equation, but it is not the only thing. It's hard to find in Europe a talent pool that is as strong as this one. It's sort of a virtual circle. You bring more companies in here and they develop more talent and you attract more people, universities get better, etc."

Having stepped back from the chief executive role, Liautaud has taken on the mantle of chief strategy officer, focusing on long-term growth alongside the chairman role he retains. His ambition is for Business Objects to become one of the 10 biggest software companies in the world, although he is not underestimating the size of the task. "We need to more or less triple the size of the company; if we are a $2.5-3 billion company, we will be in the top 10."

One of the five opportunities for growth he has identified is sales to mid-market companies - all companies with revenues of more than $1 billion already have at least one business intelligence tool but, below that level, less than 20 per cent of firms are using the technology. "There's a huge opportunity for customer acquisition there, and we want to lead the way in mid-market expansion," says Liautaud.

The Irish operation will be central to that expansion - Business Objects is centralising its European telesales in Dublin, which is its main method of selling to smaller companies.