INTERVIEW
CHARTING A PATH TO GROWTH INFOR’S EXECUTIVE VP FOR EMEA REGION JOERG JUNG, AND NEWLY APPOINTED VP AND GM FOR MEA REGION, AMEL GARDNER, DISCUSS HOW THEY ARE SHAPING A STRATEGY TO MAKE INFOR THE FASTEST GROWING COMPANY IN THE CLOUD SPACE.
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an you share your business growth plans? Joerg: We want to be the fastest-growing software company in the EMEA region – not just compared with our key competitors but any other business application software company. We want to quintuple our cloud business over the next five years, and globally, we have already done one billion dollars in cloud revenues. Now, how do we achieve such an ambitious target? For that, we will have to grow 40 percent every quarter, and we have done that in the last two quarters. I am pretty happy with where we are now. Amel: To add some regional colour to that, we had a tremendous first quarter this year, and we doubled our cloud business and added new customers. What is more important is that we have already set the foundation for this aggressive growth goal in the first quarter itself by chalking out a clear and sound execution plan. We are choosing the industries we want to focus on and aligning ourselves and our ecosystem around those target verticals. We have hired some key talent to execute this plan, including a new head for the channel. Do you see a shift in mindset in this part of the world when it comes to cloud adoption? Joerg: First of all, you need to 34
CXO INSIGHT ME
JUNE 2021
Joerg Jung
differentiate between what is cloud and what is not cloud; it is the most overused word in the industry. You have to distinguish between an always-on, multi-tenant environment and a hosted model. There are some people there who’d argue that AS/400 was the first cloud system on the planet. You need to be very precise. We made a clear decision ten years ago to go all in on the cloud, and we have tripled our business since then. We offer true multi-tenant, SaaS solutions and that sets us apart from the competition. This is going to accelerate more because more and more companies realize this is the only way to go forward. Amel: Digital transformation initiatives in the wake of Covid-19 have fueled the
Amel Gardner
demand for SaaS products in the region. If you look at the smart city initiatives in the UAE and Saudi, or the cloudfirst policy in Bahrain, there is lot of budget allocation towards cloud-based technologies, and trends like remote work and e-commerce are here to stay. Which industries are you targeting? Joerg: Our ambition is to be number one, and we know we can’t be the number one everywhere. In the past, we were pretty much all over the place, and we tried to do too many things. Now, we have defined a very clear roadmap with a clear focus on industries where we want to be successful. So, there are four industries where we want to be number one. The first is manufacturing, which is really at the core of our existence.
