Before becoming CEO of UNIT4 in June 2013, José Duarte had spent most of his career with SAP, working in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, and Latin America. Hes also had stints with Unilever and Anderson, but his passion has also been with technology-focused companies.
Coming into this position, Josés first step was to set a future growth strategy for the business, which has been a challenge, as the company was recently sold to a private-equity firm. Weve been busy because, as a listed company, you are always exposed to market forces. Weve attracted the market interest and weve concluded a public to private transaction, so we have, in essence, sold UNIT4 to a private-equity firm, and that is a substantial element in propelling our strategy as we move forward.
The strategy is, in itself, what will help us transform and grow the business. We live in a fast-changing world, not only in economic terms, but were seeing a dynamic of change that has been around for a while, but is just getting faster and faster. Companies need to be very agile to keep themselves competitive. In the world in which we live, we live in digital economieseverything needs to be digitised so you can react even faster and faster to what is happening out there.
Technological developments have been instrumental in building UNIT4s strategy. On one side, we are changing substantially what we do in terms of technology, making it much more consumer-centric, making it much more vertical-centricso focusing on different industriesso we can go all the way in digitising our customers business.
And on the other side, we felt that once we have this technology on hand, and we have quite a bit of it already, we dont want to be alone in the market, so weve decided that we are going to market with a partner ecosystem surrounding us, and we want to make it a much more global company than what we are today. UNIT4 is a well-known brand; we are one of the top 10 ERP vendors in the world, but we have ambitions to be much more and much bigger than this, and we believe this strategy will help us out in getting there. Again, it is new technology, it is a new goal to market with partners around us, and its a much more prominent global ambition in terms of our footprint.