Welcoming a new sponsor: Unit4

It is an honor to welcome Unit4 to the past and present gallery of innovators and disruptors who sponsor the Deal Architect and the New Florence. New Renaissance. blogs.

Unit4, headquartered in the Netherlands, specializes in business applications for service-intense businesses (i.e. professional services, local and national government, not-for-profit, financial services, education), especially those that face frequent business change. One of its core messages is “Cloud your way”, which allows its customers to freely move their deployment between public-, private cloud or on-premise. Unit 4 is known for usability and post-implementation agility. It is also a major investor in FinancialForce, which is focused on ERP solutions built on the salesforce.com platform.

Unit4 is not that well-known a brand outside Europe. But that is about to change.  A Sandhill column I wrote this week is titled “There will be churn”. The research for my about to be released SAP economy book showed several customers are ready for change. Their new definition of IT risk is “missing out on the opportunity to work smarter with younger, more responsive vendors.”

In the book, I profile Middlesbrough Council in the UK which is replacing SAP with Unit4’s Agresso product. Stephen Fletcher, Corporate Program Manager, is quoted in the book as saying Agresso momentum in the UK nonprofit sector (over 110 UK local authorities and many more across Europe) was a significant factor in their decision.

To take advantage of a changing market, Unit4 has a new private equity investor, Advent International. It has also recruited a new executive team with significant enterprise software experience and is doubling R&D investment.

Should be an exciting 2015. Please join me in welcoming them.