TALL PROUD AND ARCWIDE

BY GIACOMO LEE PHOTOS BY JOEL CHANT

t’s no April Fools’ gag: as COO Andy Green tells me, Arcwide was formed on the first of April 2022, and is keen to celebrate its one year anniversary in style. There’s a lot for the system integrator (SI) to be jubilant about. When it was announced at IFS Unleashed in Miami last year, Arcwide - a joint venture between IFS and its platinum service partner BearingPointarguably had its work cut out to earn its wings in the space. Many wondered as to why IFS would create its own SI with a 50 percent stake, considering the heavy risk of putting the vendor at odds with its established partner ecosystem.

One year later, and that particular detail no longer seems to be a dominant line of topic with Green as we talk in Arcwide’s London headquarters. As the chatty and open exec puts it, “we’re over 300 people nowand we make money. We actually make a profit.”

The last year has seen the new operation make over €60m in sales, with 21 go-lives to be delivered this year at an average of €2m each adding to Arcwide’s coffers. The company is also on track to employ over 500 consultants by the end of 2023, and already has a Chicago office to its name in the States.

“We’ve done it without reaching out to the market,” Green enthuses. “IFS Unleashed was really important because when I stood up on stage, I really felt like I was announcing Arcwide to the marketplace. We feel now we’ve got our message across, people know who Arcwide are and what we do.”

It’s still worth mentioning that BearingPoint has a “bearing” in all this. Arcwide shares its London HQ with BearingPoint, along with other regional headquarters. The BearingPoint logo is on the wall, on the screens and more in the office we chat together in.

It was pressure from considerable IFS rival SAP on BearingPoint which forced the spinning out of a separate IFS consultancy in Arcwide. As ERP Today learnt last year, Arcwide came from a brainstorming session between Marc Genevois, IFS’ regional president of Southern and Western Europe and Latin America, and the MD of BearingPoint France, Philippe Chaniot.

Given its established relationship with SAP, the hands of the latter company were tied when it came to doing more business with IFS. As IFS started winning more business with BearingPoint, SAP began to make its disgruntlement known.

Necessity begat innovation, and Arcwide was created to manage the risks, with a name that came from another brainstorming session between Green and other execs.

“‘Arcwide’ came from nowhere,” laughs the COO. “It means nothing, it stands for nothing. It’s just a name!”

That name is out there though, side-by-side with BearingPoint’s. Arcwide shares service-level agreements with the original company and runs its back office off BearingPoint systems.

“The relationship with BearingPoint has never been stronger,” as the chief operating officer says. “Culturally it’s important we fit together. Operationally it’s important we fit together… What BearingPoint gets off the back of it is they don’t have an IFS consulting organization. That’s why Arcwide is here: they get the change management, they can deliver training, they can do integrations and data migration.”

And while BearingPoint remains a behemoth, Green puts down Arcwide’s current success not just to its IFS-centric operandi, but also “the personal touch” from being a smaller, nimbler player.

“We have regular calls with everybody, and we try to make those calls enjoyable,” the exec elaborates. “They feel like we’re people, and not just a COO and a CEO.”