Global ERP provider touches down in Oz

Global ERP provider Cordys has set up shop in Australia, snatching a local IT veteran to run the operation out of a new Melbourne office.

The ten-year-old company has 14 offices globally across Europe, the US and Asia Pacific, with 200 customers and 450 staff.

The company has appointed IT veteran Steve Thomas as its A/NZ director. Thomas has experience running Australian and Asian regional sales, technical support and consulting operations for several organisations including EMC.

Cordys' software bridges business process management, integration and composite application development into a single platform for deployment on premise or in the cloud.

Its global customers include the likes of China Mobile and Indian insurance agency IFFCO Tokio.

The “partner-centric” company works in conjunction with Fujitsu and CSC globally on its ERP platform and will extend those relationships locally.

It has also signed up Brisbane-based cloud service and ICT provider Aptus International Services and is looking for a handful more partners.

“In Australia we currently have three resellers, and I am looking for one or two more, for a total of five, but no more than that,” Thomas said.

“We want to be able to enable and support them to be successful rather than build a long list of resellers.”

Cordys will operate with a minimal local presence of no more than 10 staff members, preferring to work through its partners alongside a “Centre of Excellence” based in India - its technical support centre of experts for partners.

"We support our resellers with our own experts, and our model, being partner-centric, means we have a centre with a complete range of experts to support our partners,” Thomas said. 

“The reason we do it out of India, and a single location, is to avoid conflict with our partners by building a local implementation team. We need to have that expertise and capability to support our partners.”

Thomas said Australia had always been considered a strategic lynchpin in the Asia Pacific, but admitted the delay in setting up locally had been due to a different strategic focus.

“It’s always been a part of the plan to make us truly global,” he said. “The reason it took so long is because the growth up until 2010 ... was more focused on target customers and opportunities rather than a global plan.

“We were focused on the technology and innovation and acquiring customers. It was a technology innovation engine, and in 2012, we decided we had the technology, so we got in and got strategic about how to become a software company, not just a technology company.”

Thomas declined to provide information on the privately owned company’s financial performance or Asia Pacific market share by the time of publication.