Meet the new CEO of former Softline business, Noventiq
CRN spoke with Hervé Tessler to find out more about Softline's rebrand to Noventiq and his ambition to double business every two years
In October last year, Softline shed its skin and emerged as Noventiq, a move the group claimed signalled the start of a new era for the rapidly evolving company.
Along with the rebrand came a fresh global CEO in March when president and COO Hervé Tessler stepped into the top position to replace Sergey Chernovolenko, who has taken over Tessler's former role.
Now with a new look and ambitious strategy, CRN sat down with Tessler to hear more about Noventiq and what it plans to achieve.
Why the rebrand and what is Noventiq's mission?
The tech sector is quick to develop, and in order to reflect these changes Noventiq decided to embark on its rebrand from Softline.
Despite the facelift, however, Tessler told CRN he will not be changing Noventiq's strategy, which he explained takes the form of a three-pronged approach.
"Number one is geographic expansion. It's self explanatory - how do we expand into new channels, new countries, but also how do we expand within a given context?" He asked.
"The second leg is called portfolio expansion and that's what, to me, is becoming more and more important as we invest. And that portfolio expansion is about enhancing our capabilities.
"The third leg, which is probably the easiest, we call the channel expansion. We might look, for instance, at an acquisition that's going to bring core business, not many new capabilities, but we're going to basically acquire the talent pool and the customer base.
"Organically, that leg is going to be about expanding our sales coverage. So we're making a lot of investment in account managers. We started building some kind of industry expertise and we're going to keep doing that."
However, leaving his mark as the new head of the company, Tessler revealed he has included a fourth element to Noventiq's original three point growth plan.
"I've added a fourth dimension that I call leadership capability expansion that I believe is going to be critical," he said.
"We're in a people business and if you ask me what is a differentiator at Noventiq, it's people and quality of our people."
In its third quarter 2022 results, Noventiq posted a turnover of $398.8m, an increase of 45 per cent, with double-digit growth in all keys regions, EMEA, APAC and LATAM.
Tessler added that the special ingredient to continually growing internationally lies with Noventiq's people.
"We need to invest to grow our leaders and we need to onboard different people, different sets of skills, different backgrounds, in different geos," he stated.
"The only way to be successful is to have the right people to do that locally on the ground."
Noventiq to double business every two years
When detailing what he hopes to achieve with his four step action plan, Tessler laid down his bold ambition to duplicate Noventiq's business.
"I want to double our business every two years, I call that the two-by-two strategy," he said.
"We want to double profit, double revenue, double EBITDA, and double our customer base."
Noventiq has so far been on quite the international shopping spree.
Since the rebrand, the group has acquired Indian Microsoft partners G7 CR Technologies, Egypt-based Microsoft partner DigiTech, UAE-based Seven Seas Technology, and the Saga Group.
Tessler confirmed M&A is indeed part of his company's growth strategy and outlined what sort of services and solutions he has his eye on.
"One is definitely multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is the big plan and to do that, we're already pretty well equipped, and what I mean is, we're a major global partner for Microsoft," he said.
"We are also engaged at building more and more skin in the game with AWS, and we're already adding a certain level of business with Google. There I would almost say we're doubling or tripling down.
"One of the other two big things is definitely cyber. We're going to keep investing.
"And the third one, we all know that everybody's talking about ChatGPT. It's like a buzzword.
"It's a game-changer. I don't know how it's going to change the game, but that's going to change a lot of things.
"So we're also having a lot of discussions with the vendors because as you know, Microsoft invested in OpenAI, but the others are planning to play a big role."
Update on NASDAQ listing
Noventiq is currently listed on the London Stock Exchange and announced in February its plans to land on the NASDAQ.
Tessler said this is a major step for the group this year, but a step that will involve "a lot of reverse engineering".
"We also have to perform so that when we are at NASDAQ, we attract investors because we are going to the NASDAQ to gain access to the means to leverage our model and to accelerate our profitable growth."
Tessler was unable to give too much away for obvious reasons, but revealed he hopes to make an announcement regarding the listing sooner, rather than later.
"We're building the plan, it's in great shape and it's progressing as per the expectation," he said.
"What we want to achieve is we want one to get the company valued for what it is worth, which we believe is not the case today.
"We want to boost our ability to engage with investors that are going to help us accelerate and deliver value.
"My job is about value creation and I'm a strong believer of that.
"What will show our value will come from my ability to create value for our employees and vendors."
He added: "If we do that, then ultimately we're going to create value for shareholders and the company is going to be valued for what it is worth."