iTWire sits down with recently appointed Pronto Software MD Chad Gates.
Chad Gates was promoted to the role of managing director at Pronto Software earlier this year on the retirement of David Jackman.
In his previous role of chief operating officer, Gates was responsible for Pronto's cloud services. That strategy has proved successful: during 2015-16, 73% of Pronto's new and upgrade business was cloud based.
Part of that success stems from the way midmarket businesses - Pronto's target market - don't necessarily understand cloud, Gates told iTWire, so the company provides a package of infrastructure and applications including non-Pronto software such as file servers and mail servers.
{loadposition stephen08}The importance of cloud to Pronto means it is very focussed on security, he said. "Our cloud team are paranoid," he said, and a security culture permeates the company. While security is only one element for people working in areas such as development, it is important that everyone keeps it front of mind even though insisting that the right processes are in place "makes me unpopular with some people," Gates said.
In July this year, Pronto combined its cloud and on-premises technical services teams to provide customers with centralised support and employees with better career paths. Even though some of the affected staff have been with the company for 20 years "they've all been remarkably flexible and are engaging with the transition," he said.
Pronto has a very low staff turnover, Gates said. The company promotes from within and works on skills development. Since Pronto works in many market sectors there are plenty of opportunities to move within the company, he explained.
But that low turnover doesn't mean a lack of new blood. Pronto hires between 20 and 30 people a year, mostly in development and customer-facing roles to cope with growth.
Gates admits that the company could have grown faster, but it is 100% internally funded (Pronto has been staff-owned since 2001) with no debt or external investment and the company's dual goals are "happy staff, happy customers."
"Foisting change onto people because it looks pretty or because the market says we should is not the right motivation," he said. For example, Pronto deliberately avoided offering a web UI for ERP until the technology reached the point where it was fast enough and offered a good user experience: "Web Sockets was the key technology for us". And then it made sure that its web UI not only had modern features such as touch-friendliness but also made sure all the familiar keystrokes still worked.
"We win business because we understand the customer a lot better than our competitors do," he said.
"There is a big trail of dissatisfaction with IT" among company directors and boards, largely because of the selling practices of certain vendors, especially those backed by venture capitalists. "It rubs off on the whole industry and that annoys me," said Gates. So Pronto is working to restore faith in technology by delivering products people can trust.
"A fundamental driving force behind what we do" is that we know customers don't want us to break their businesses, Gates explained. Pronto's software doesn't try to enforce supposed best practices, because the company understands that each company is different and the owners want to preserve their differentiation. Since we own our company, we understand other business owners. But that doesn't mean we don't challenge our customers' ideas, he said, and sometimes they challenge ours.
Also, the last few years have seen a lot of venture capital and mergers and acquisitions activity. Pronto can respond quickly when a customer acquires another company that's in a different sector or geography, or that currently uses different software. The same applies when a business divests or spins off one of its units. "They're the sort of businesses we work well with," said Gates. Normally, installing a new ERP "is like a heart-lung transplant" but Pronto can reduce the pain and risk.
"I don't want Pronto to be seen as just the ERP company," he said, pointing to activities such as its Woven digital agency operation.
And in October Pronto will relaunch its BI software. The company has been doing "significant work" in that area, developing "expertise beyond [the] product" that will help customers get the most from their data and BI capability.