...of the opportunity, which only happens once every other decade. They need interoperability between proprietary platforms, between sub-frameworks and departmental frameworks.
This is important because in a more complex world, companies need more flexibility. Businesses have to be run from a more entrepreneurial viewpoint, and managers have to be empowered to run the business.
Your stated aim is to become a €1bn revenue company by 2011. Is this still achievable in a recessionary climate? If so, how are you going to do it?
The aim is for 10 percent top-line growth per annum across all areas of our business, and we see four key pillars for this growth.
The first is innovation: Gartner says we are market leader in almost all our product segments.
The second is geographic expansion: we operate in 70 countries and have a globally diversified presence. Phase one saw us take over the business of our distributors in countries like Brazil, South Africa and Japan, and the next phase is about exploiting those customer bases more effectively. The recession hasn't affected all countries of the world in the same way, and we're seeing exceptional growth there.
The third pillar is partnerships. We're focusing on expanding them, especially in vertical markets. For example, in the UK, a third of our business comes from the public sector, a third from finance and insurance, and the rest from a mixture of areas such as retailers, manufacturing and services companies.
Surprisingly, business in the finance and insurance sector hasn't been hit so far — in fact, the reverse is true. Banks rely on technology, particularly things like trading systems, which handle high volumes of transactions. Market volatility means that the number of transactions is going up and so people need more software to make more money.
The final pillar is mergers and acquisitions. We're interested in purchasing complementary products, customer bases and developing our professional services business, which currently contributes less than 30 percent of our revenues, to support growth in all countries and in all segments.
Does this mean your SOA and BPM business is now more important than your mainframe-integration one?
The mainframe is our core product segment, and it helps that maintenance is an operating expense, not an investment area. Companies in sectors such as utilities and telecoms have proved relatively stable due to their business models, and their share prices haven't declined to the same extent as more investment-dependent ones. So some of our product segments are in more stable areas. But growth areas focus around WebMethods, which we acquired 18 months ago.
How important do you think cloud computing will be, and what will be your response to it?
Cloud will have its place. It's similar in concept to software-as-a-service [Saas] and application service providers before that. The idea is that you share your applications with other users and someone else operates them. So it's an application-oriented idea, but we provide business infrastructure software. It's the SAPs, Microsofts and Googles that will focus on that, but we could sell them some backend infrastructure so it may be a market opportunity for us.
