Customer demand and sales growing rapidly worldwide
Sliedrecht, The Netherlands, 27 November 2012 - UNIT4, the global business software provider for fast-changing organisations, has reaffirmed its strong commitment to cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions and announced that its SaaS and Subscription revenue has now passed the €50 million annual run rate barrier and is growing rapidly. The Group reached this important milestone at the beginning of Q4 2012.
UNIT4 delivers solutions optimised for what it calls Businesses Living IN Change (BLINC).
Public sector and commercial services organisations in this segment experience business change more often than others and value UNIT4's solutions for their capability to embrace change in the most simple, quick and cost effective way.
Over the past twelve months UNIT4 has continued to increase investment in both its SaaS solutions portfolio and cloud infrastructures. The Group is encouraged to see that the strong revenues generated from these offerings underpin its strategy to offer customers a no compromise choice when it comes to how their solutions are deployed and managed.
UNIT4’s CEO Chris Ouwinga said: “Our strategy to transition rapidly to being a cloudfocused company is also paying off, driven by growing customer demand for SaaS solutions.
As the world’s leading supplier of software to fast changing organisations, we had to embrace change ourselves and respond to this exciting opportunity. Despite the high growth in SaaS and subscription business, our on-premises (license-based) revenues have not declined, showing that we are gaining market share and beating our competition.”
As proof that UNIT4’s strategy is right, the company is seeing strong levels of activity and sales success in North America, UK, Benelux, Scandinavia and Asia Pacific in particular. In Germany the company re-established itself as a major player in the market through a number of recent sales, partnerships and acquisitions.
Recent large SaaS wins include:
• International hotel chain – taking Coda Financials as a SaaS solution
• Major Nordic retailer Reitan – Agresso beating other high-end ERP players in a cloud-based deal
• Large Benelux based wholesale building materials suppliers – Agresso cloud deal
beating Microsoft Dynamics
• University in Sweden – taking Agresso via public cloud
• Large UK County Council – Agresso HR & Payroll as SaaS
• Education services firm in Netherlands – HR, payroll and finance, SaaS delivery
• US based computer manufacturer – FinancialForce Billing
• North American civil aircraft manufacturer – FinancialForce Accounting
• Large UK utility company – Business Collaborator, SaaS delivery
• French software company – FinancialForce PSA
• Major UK based global services company – FinancialForce PSA
• Nine UK further education colleges – moving to a cloud-based shared service based on Agresso
Other major deals recently signed include:
• Two large UK Councils – Agresso, beating SAP
• State of Saxony in Germany – Agresso, replacing and beating SAP in a significant deal which will see further downstream business as other operations in the State move to UNIT4.
• Global financial services company – Global roll out of Coda Financials, replacing Oracle
• Major UK city council – Agresso, beating and replacing Oracle
UNIT4’s strategy has encouraged several hundred medium and large organisations to install its multi-tenant cloud solutions and also a growing number on hybrid, virtualised cloud computing models. Customers adopting this approach benefit from substantial cost savings and can satisfy their cloud computing requirements without the underlying data security, data residence and change control concerns that many ERP buyers still feel regarding many cloud computing models.
Ton Dobbe, Vice President of Product Marketing at UNIT4, explained: “Most of today’s solutions, whether delivered on-premise or in the cloud, do not support the many organisations that experience on-going pressures from business change such as reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions and compliance and regulation issues. Many software companies have glossed over the fact that after implementation, it is the underlying architecture of an application that dictates whether it can support a quick and effective response to business change or not; getting this wrong ends up in long delays, very high cost and significant business disruption.”
“Many in the industry seem to believe that cloud technology itself solves all the change problems that companies have. At UNIT4 we know that this is simply not the case. Cloud solves just the technical change challenge, enabling technical scalability and removing the painful updates and upgrade process. To solve the business change challenge, the underlying solution architecture is crucial. What we deliver is at least as important as how we deliver it!”