Earlier this evening, I read a glowing report about Jeeves International Systems AB by P.J. Jakovijevik (registration required). This is a small Swedish ERP company with leanings towards EU manufacture for sub 500 employee companies. I was particularly taken with a couple of data points included by PJ:
Jeeves recently declared its ambition to become one of Europe’s leading business systems providers, in maintaining a minimum annual growth of 25 percent, with a minimum operating margin of 10 percent. Growth is a vital sign of success in this sector, which as a whole is stagnating; demonstrating a combination of growth and profitability for over a dozen quarters makes Jeeves stand out from the crowd.
Impressive. And the financials bear that out.
Over 80 percent of the partners have more than 5 years of experience with the product, which in theory means that customers gain expert advice and support.
The company has 350+ partners, mostly in Europe. Note: the company website may be out of date – says 4+ years. But that’s less relevant than the fact its ecosystem is 4 times the number of direct employees. Jeeves has created a rapid growth sales and service ecosystem to do the tough work of reaching the market. It incents the partner network by providing an open approach to extending the system. Partners are carefully selected and vetted for their industry expertise in systems development. They are allowed to ‘own’ those extensions.
Since the work is shared intelligently with about sixty trusted partners in twenty countries, Jeeves can focus its resources on cost-effective product development, in order to add functionality that leads to a lower TCO for the customer. This focus, along with the system’s structure, makes Jeeves one of the world’s most functional business systems in terms of incurred product development time. In relative terms, Jeeves spends four times more on R&D than its main competitors (that is, approximately half of total revenues; about half of its workforce are developers).
That’s innovative. And it translates into financial success
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