ReadSoft CEO Per Akerberg joined the company in November last year, having spent the last 15 years in the software space, most recently with Swedish company Enea. Since joining ReadSoft, he has restructured the business and has some ambitious plans for growth beyond the company’s traditional SAP-focused software solutions into the cloud and other enterprise systems. He spoke to Freya Purnell.
FP: What attracted you to the role of CEO at ReadSoft?
PA: First of all, when you are talking about software, it’s very important to have the possibility to scale the business – that we can make sure that we can sell our solutions all over the world. If you look at the companies that have been very successful, among them SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, they have been able to take the product and sell it over and over again throughout the whole world. When I looked at ReadSoft the first time, I saw that there is a good chance we can really take this company to the next level.
I also really wanted to work with an international company with operations in Asia, Oceania, Europe and North and South America. And thirdly, my wife is a customer of ReadSoft. I asked her what she thought, and she said she had a very good experience with Readsoft, great people, great product, and you should go and work for them. So I listened to my wife.
FP: You have undertaken some restructuring of the company since you joined – what is your vision for the company?
PA: The company had had the same structure since it was incorporated, and it was very much based on having an operation in each country we were present in, which makes it very difficult for the small and new countries to develop quickly since we have a broad portfolio, and you need experienced technical people for all our products. So we created four regions that could help each other. For example, we have the technical people here in Australia and they could really accelerate our growth in Asia, where we believe we have a good opportunity.
I also felt we had many scattered places where we develop our products, so we consolidated our R&D facilities into two – one for ERP workflow products and one for the capture technology – to make sure that we don’t reinvent the wheel, and that we accelerate our product development and output from the labs.
We need to improve our product management capability, so in the past product management was hidden within the lab – now we have made it an independent organisation with a clear mandate. We also created a CTO office. As a technology company, I think it is very important that you have someone that’s looking beyond the roadmaps, what’s happening in our domain, what’s happening with SAP.
FP: What are your growth plans for the company?
PA: We have a fantastic opportunity and a fantastic platform. The plan that is taking us to 2015 is about growth, but as a software company, we are not really satisfied with the profitability we deliver right now, so we will first focus on improving our margins, and since we are growing so rapidly, if we can keep our costs stable, we’ll create good margins.The next steps could be many different things, so to accelerate the company, we believe we have many different levers. We are looking at geographical growth – we opened up in South Africa this spring, and we see Asia as being able to really accelerate.
We have invested heavily in our online cloud solution. In the past, our cloud solution was very much a capture-based product, now we have extended that to simple workflow. That opens up a new market for us, because it is targeted towards the mid to small companies.
We have also invested heavily in Oracle in the last couple of years, and we have had some bad luck, given that Oracle changed architecture, and we had to then also change our architecture, which took longer than anticipated. But Oracle has a fantastic share of the market, so we hope that we can have the same success we have had with SAP.
FP: Obviously there is economic uncertainty around the world at present, how has this affected the business?
PA: We are still doing a lot of business, but we can clearly see in certain parts of the world, it is taking longer for a customer to make a decision. We also see some challenges in Australia in the last three quarters, with decision time taking longer, so we are absolutely affected but our growth speaks for itself.
FP: What do you see as the main competitive advantage that ReadSoft has in the market?
PA: I see a couple of things. Our new product, Process Director, is more like a platform than a product which sits inside SAP, which makes it very strong in integration and also it supports many different processes. So if the customer invests, they can utilise it for many other processes, which gives them a good return on investment very quickly.
Given that we have a global presence and we have a fairly strong professional services muscle within the organisation – we have around 250 consultants who can really give good information in a fast and efficient way – what I hear is that we can beat our competition, so that’s another very important selling point for customers – that we can implement faster.
FP: What changes might we see in document process automation over the next five years?
PA: We will see the next generation of cloud solutions. That is changing the view of how we access software from everywhere, and you will be able to work from the bus or subway or wherever, so that will also increase speed and efficiency. This will not be either/or on-premise or in the cloud, it will be a combination, but for sure, cloud will grow rapidly over the coming year – we just don’t know how fast.
We will also see many more administrative processes being automated. But let me be clear on that – we will not be the company that does all the processes. We have decided to focus on four processes to make sure that we are leaders in those processes – accounts payable, accounts receivable, customer orders or sales order, and huge document transactions – and we will have leading end-to-end solutions for those processes. When we are leaders in those four, then we will take on the next processes.
Then there is e-invoicing, which especially in the Nordic countries is very advanced, but the growth is very limited. But for sure, there will be a point where that will be significant, and point-to-point e-invoicing within a workflow is something we will have to investigate and make a decision about in the future.
FP: Do you have any plans for acquisitions?
PA: We have acquisitions on our strategic agenda. But ReadSoft’s position is very much that we will not do a lot of acquisitions, but the ones we do, we will do very carefully and integrate them and make sure they are successful. We are looking at strategic acquisitions that could expand our portfolio, so when we talk to customers in Australia, in Europe or in America, we have a better solution for our customers. So you should expect to see acquisitions in the company, absolutely. But not at the pace Oracle is doing them.
