Koen Deryckere, CEO Cegeka: The vast majority of the people in our global delivery network, which we are building to expand into the major European economies, will be in Romania

The Belgian IT services group Cegeka, with over 10,000 employees and revenues of around 1.3 billion euros, wants to become a European champion of the industry, and the engine of this plan will be Romania, which, in the vision of the group's new CEO, will become the “backbone” of its expansion across the continent.

“It is the moment for a truly European player. That is why this bloc, Romania, Moldova, Greece and others, is so important, and we will have to scale it. It all comes down to the quality of the work and the productivity we will be able to deliver from here,” said Koen Deryckere, CEO of the Cegeka group since May 1, in an interview for Ziarul Financiar.

Deryckere is not a new name in the industry. He came to Cegeka after a career of more than 25 years at Accenture, where he was chief operating officer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, coordinating more than 140,000 people across 38 countries, and most recently led Accenture for France and Benelux.

The ambition that brought him to Cegeka is, he says, “to create European growth, then global, but certainly European at the beginning.” The group, headquartered in Hasselt and founded in 1992, is strong especially in Belgium and the Netherlands, which together make up around two-thirds of the company, and now wants a larger presence in the continent's major economies, such as France, the United Kingdom and Germany.

This is not, however, about competing for the world's largest clients. “Do we work for the pharmaceutical giants, the big energy companies? To some extent, but not primarily,” Deryckere says. Cegeka's target segment is a different one: “Mid-cap, entrepreneurial clients, who usually have a very strong presence in Europe, perhaps also in the US and something in Asia, but with Europe as their real core.”

A European champion tailored, therefore, for mid-sized companies with roots on the continent, not for the global multinationals. To serve these clients across several markets at once, Deryckere says, you need a delivery base that can offer “world-class” services, with critical mass, a single working methodology, and artificial intelligence built in. The question is where you place it, and the analysis, based on technical criteria, geopolitical stability, EU membership and sovereignty, led, he says, to a single place: “Romania is simply a fantastic place to host a large part of our global delivery network.”

This is where “the vast majority of the people” in this network will be based, and “this bloc (which also includes Moldova and Greece) will grow, for sure.” The main reason is technical talent. “The talent is here. You can feel it, you can see it,” says Deryckere, who made Bucharest one of his first visits after taking over as CEO in May, to discuss the way forward with the local team. Beyond the cost difference, he adds, what matters is solid technical talent, which, boosted by artificial intelligence, can make the difference “both in the effectiveness of the solutions and in cost efficiency.”

And Romania's role does not stop at delivery. The word Deryckere places alongside “delivery” is “innovation”: the country will also play an important role in the sovereign cloud that Cegeka is building in Belgium, together with its partner KEYES, for clients in public administration and critical sectors. This is an area where Europe “is far behind” the American giants, and catching up will be, he admits, “a multi-year effort.” “A significant part of the expertise will have to come from here,” Deryckere says.

Ovidiu Pinghioiu, Managing Director of Cegeka Romania: Romania is one of the countries that invest the least in IT.

Ovidiu Pinghioiu, the CEO of Cegeka Romania, says that the local subsidiary already has one of the strongest cloud infrastructure capabilities in the market: “Few people know that we, Cegeka Romania, have one of the largest cloud infrastructure capabilities here, at this location. If we had been a local company, we would have had roughly three times the infrastructure of the other players,” he estimates. This is exactly the kind of technical capacity the group wants to put behind the sovereign cloud project.

He also explained what Cegeka is planning. The company opened a delivery center here in 2012 and began addressing the local market in 2017. “When we started here, in Romania, in 2017, we actually had a different vision… we wanted to focus more on added value and on outcomes (outcome-based projects). The market said no… And we decided to follow the client and the market. So what is happening now in the local market is actually something we have been preparing for over the past nine years.”

As for local demand for IT services, it is still very low. “Romania is one of the countries that invest the least in IT” unlike those in Belgium or the Netherlands, for example.

That is why, the local CEO says, growth cannot come from the domestic market: “The big growth will come from the global delivery center, because the local market is not so large” in order to compete with the volume brought by international clients.