Your company saw very good financial results for the first half of 2016 (+7.8% in sales). What do you believe is behind this growth?
One of the main reasons is our successful change in positioning. We’re at a crucial time in France’s digital transformation, and our clients (both companies and institutions) need to manage their digital transformation while continuing to take their existing resources into account. To do so, they need new partners to help them in this two-pronged task. Open works to reconcile digital and computer technologies. The digital transformation must have an IT base but cannot be done without the BUs, which represent close to 40% of IT spending.
This is a quite innovative positioning in the digital service providers world where most of our competitors have chosen to focus solely on IT or eliminate it entirely.
How are you organised in house?
We decided to create five digital agencies that focus on BUs but work with IT: mobility and geolocation, big data, e-commerce (we beefed up these last two in March by buying out Lateos), IoT, and now the Web agency with our La Netscouade buyout. These purchases add 45 digital communication specialists with a strong technological base to our team. We had previously been missing this building block and will be promoting their know-how. Plus, Benoit Thieulin, founder of La Netscouade, is now innovation director at Open. Benoit is highly respected in the digital transformation world and will help us transmit our message.
Can you provide an example of this convergence?
The FastLab concept lets us complete innovative projects in under six weeks. We bring together multidisciplinary project teams in one place, and provide them with the latest technologies and digital and methodological experts. Our initial projects provided very good results.
In this context, what do you think of ROOMn?
ROOMn is interesting most of all for its positioning. There are very few events in France that truly focus on the digital transformation. But most of all, it’s important that as many people as possible realise that the digital transformation is imperative and that it works! POC and experiments are great, but enough is enough! It’s time to get down to doing something concrete. Before was the time for convincing people, but now companies have to get going and ROOMn can help get this message through by no longer focussing on “why” but on “how”.
