NATIONAL SURVEY
Interview with a growing business
Piero Falotti, Partner Manager - Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa at SuccessFactors, talks to IT Europa. SuccessFactors is a US-based specialist in Business Execution Software, which has been expanding in south east Europe.
What growth does it see in the region?
Last year for Europe in general, SuccessFactors grew nearly 80%. We see the European market as a huge untapped opportunity. We anticipate 100%+ growth, possibly more in Central and Eastern Europe over the coming year. With which sort of customers? Large companies are the focus, but our solu- tions help companies of all sizes from SMEs to large enterprises. Which countries in particular? We are starting with Czech, Slovakia, Poland, Romania and Russia as focus this year. We’ll move beyond these very soon.
Are there any factors in this region which make it different?
The markets have just finished a large phase of ERP implementation with SAP and Oracle. Now, as the market goes into the next generation of applica- tions, like CRM, the Saas model is seeing more and more demand and the independence from huge vendors is well received in the market, especially after some massive ERP disasters (Hungarian post, Romanian telecoms etc).
data centres ready for the solutions, and this is where our partners have seen the opportunity.” “Despite the activation coming step by step, we can see that almost every
country has partners who are already certified in order to not just provide the solution, but the experience. We have a group of partners who have invested, and who are now in the final phase of becoming certified and becoming ready for the data centre virtualisation which is present in this region in particular,” he says. What is limiting growth? Roman Foeckl: again: “In our sector, I see the nor-
mal limitations to growth caused by cautious budgets for IT Security spend- ing. I would even say that growth is limited by the availability of skilled young developers as universities seem to have reached their limits in producing new waves of IT specialists and there is a strong demand for them both in Romania and abroad, and this has a stronger impact than external economic factors. That is one of the reasons why the Romanian software development segment in particular has been reporting growth even during these economically dif- ficult times.”
Also, companies in Central Eastern Europe are fairly new to concepts such as Talent Management, and Business Execution, so it’s the right time to come in and evangelize, teach and also learn from their own unique approaches. The reforms in many companies, used to the top-down approach will be able to take advantage of SuccessFactors solutions to help them in that massive transition
You have just appointed New Frontier as your channel in the region. Why?
1. Understanding of our Saas/Cloud model 2. Commitment that this model is the future of software solutions 3. Size and coverage – New Frontier covers all countries with a significant set of skilled people 4. Track record of success in the last 15 years in east/central Europe
Companies have cut their budgets and postponed their investments in
new products. “Luckily, we offer very competitive pricing for our software and provide our customers with alternative server platforms to Windows that keep their overall TCO for our IT Security products low, says Roman Foeckl. “Our customers are mainly based in western Europe and Asia and about
80% of our market is represented by SMBs / consumers and 20% by enterpris- es. We want to stay in the medium to long term on our path of making great, easy to use, innovative and cross platform security software. As a company, we want to continue growing at the speed of the past six years and to stay profit- able.” “We do with some work with other large IT companies who have offices in
Romania, but for our company in particular, a more effective strategy is to usu- ally work with our partners’ offices in western Europe or Asia directly, rather than dealing with their local offices in Romania.” Some Romanian IT companies have operations in Bulgaria and Moldova, but
not beyond. Ukraine and even further Eastern countries like Georgia are not yet a priority for Romanian IT businesses.
30 APR 2010
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