Atempo-Wooxo’s mission is to protect companies from data loss and business interruption in the event of computer disasters: natural disasters, hardware breakdowns, burglaries, human error, cybercrime attacks, etc. The objective is zero data loss and 100% uptime.
1. Why international?
In just a few years, cybercrime has become the world’s leading economic scourge. 90% of companies have already been affected by cybercrime, without necessarily knowing it or reporting a loss. Today, companies are totally dependent on their IT systems, and data is the source of all value creation. The internationalization of our activities responds to four main challenges:
- Achieving critical mass: Europe needs digital champions. Cybersecurity is an essential link in the development of our nuggets, ETIs and European digital and cloud computing champions. As a member of the FrenchTech120 selection, we need to reach the critical mass required to support their international ambitions;
- This is why Atempo-Wooxo has customers in every country in the world, with a physical presence, thanks to subsidiaries, on every continent: in Europe (UK and Germany), America (south of San Francisco) and Asia (China, South Korea and Singapore);
- Contribute to European autonomy: theCOVID crisis has revealed our heavy dependence on American technologies. More and more decisions will be taken automatically, thanks to artificial intelligence, which means we need to protect and guarantee data integrity. In a context of heightened economic competition and open cyberwarfare, we cannot depend totally on foreign technologies to protect our data without these economic competitors also depending on us. In cybersecurity, we need to reproduce the deterrence that prevailed in the atomic age and guaranteed peace;
- Minimize the impact of regional economic crises by internationalizing our activities.
2. How international?
We have an established maturation process for attacking foreign markets. We start with a research phase. We subscribe to a number of firms that provide us with information on market opportunities and trends. We also map the market segments with the strongest appetite for our offerings, and the existing competitors, to identify which functional needs are least well covered. Then, we go out and visit the local market, attend trade shows and meet with technology partners. If customers can’t find local solutions that meet their performance requirements, we then try to match their needs with the solutions offered by our technology partners. If we have initial agreements with these partners, we then set up a subsidiary in the country to roll out the agreement.
As soon as we have international ambitions, even if we are addressing niche markets, we are obliged to work with alliances, i.e. to find local intermediaries who will carry our offers. Forging alliances is crucial to our ability to expand. It’s our partners who provide us with the sales and marketing manpower and the proximity to our customers. We aim to integrate them into a complete offering. Our solution will serve as a showcase for them, enabling them to sell their equipment and their network, and thus highlight their differentiation from local competitors. Our aim is to give them software performance so that they can sell more easily, and above all so that they can offer their customers a complete solution and not just a product.
The success of this integration in a country lies in the quality of the human resources mobilized. So, training is a very important issue, because we deal with complex subjects and work in an ecosystem. We’re just one link in the ecosystem that needs to be brought together.
What are the key factors for international success? The first thing is the quality of the innovation we produce through R&D, with a focus on differentiation and performance. The second is “getting the word out”, which is why we have an increasingly important marketing dimension. It’s not just a question of existing, but of making the most of this differentiation so that our customers quickly understand our uniqueness in a simple, natural way. The third challenge is to be distributed, to be accessible to the market. Alliances are therefore strategic. If we don’t have access to customers, we can’t have ambitions for the country. Finally, the last thing is execution by well-trained people, as we said earlier.
3. Is the international dimension part of your strategy for bouncing back from the crisis?
The main characteristics of the COVID-19 crisis are that it is global and all-encompassing, in the sense that it impacts all sectors of activity, with varying degrees of intensity. Our international presence, which often protects us from localized economic crises, is of no help here. But every crisis gives rise to risks and opportunities.
One of the lessons of this health crisis is that the capillarity of our distribution networks, which enabled us to offer a local service to our customers, was hampered by decrees prescribing the general measures necessary to deal with the epidemic within the framework of the state of health emergency: distancing, confinement, etc. It is piquant to note that the players who fared best were those who offered their services on a marketplace or in cloud mode. They have even posted insolent growth during this period, sometimes unfairly attracting the wrath of public opinion. To protect ourselves from another crisis of this kind, we need to make it easier to access our offers, and reinvent a new form of virtual proximity that can replace customer visits when necessary.
Secondly, in the software publishing sector, we have observed that a good number of players, most of them fund-financed, have scaled back under pressure from their funds, in order to fit in with an exit timetable imposed by investors. As a result, they have retreated. Geographically, by abandoning certain areas with a lower return on investment. Functionally, by abandoning R&D resources and thus sacrificing the long to the medium term. Over the same period, we have increased our R&D resources by 50%, and strengthened our marketing and sales teams, and we will continue to do so in order to exploit those geographical zones or areas left fallow. We believe it’s in the climb that we need to accelerate!
