Before this, CRI had successfully offered IT and business solutions mainly to public institutions in the BeLux countries for 30 years.
CRI Group S.A. is an independent technological holding based in Luxembourg. The CRI Group of IT companies has 350 employees, an annual turnover of 45 million euros and operates in the BeLux and six south-eastern European countries: Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece and Romania. It serves market-leading telecom customers, such as Vodafone, Orange and Deutsche Telecom, and delivers business solutions to key players in the financial sector. The CRI Group is also engaged in important strategic cooperation with universities and technological foundations.
Within this group, the ‘new CRI (Luxembourg) S.A.’ aims to become a key player in the BeLux private and public markets, refining and intensifying its current operations. Making your business happen is the new slogan of CRI S.A., expressing the core message of the company in just four words.
On 14 October 2011, CRI’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Stefano Bodrato assumed full management of the company. In the following interview he talks openly about the new company strategy and how the company will be geared up for the coming years.
Content Studio: Stefano, first of all, welcome to the company. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself?
Stefano Bodrato: Thank you for the welcome. To present myself, I’m European, of Italian origin, and I’ve been working in technological and financial fields all over the world for 25 years. I started off my career at the Olivetti Group in the Eastern European countries in corporate marketing, followed by the Intracom Group, before joining Intrasoft International as General Manager of the Belgian affiliate and for Corporate Outsourcing Services and then as CEO of the Bulgarian affiliate. After this, I became Corporate Vice-President European Institutions at Bull S.A. in 2006, where I was involved in IT and TLC infrastructure and services, a position that I left to enter into the merger and acquisitions market. Currently, besides having become CEO of CRI, I also hold various advisory posts, both for governmental bodies in Belgium, Italy, Bulgaria and Romania and for private enterprises.
Content Studio: Can you tell us more about CRI’s new company strategy?
Stefano Bodrato: For the next three months, the company’s strategy is firstly, to take good care of our current contracts and do efficient account management. Secondly, not go after everything that moves but participate only in a precisely targeted selection of calls for tender, focusing on our main, long-term institutional customers such as Eurostat and the Publications Office of the European Union. We also want to unleash some heavy investment in personnel and training infrastructures. All training must aim at certificates in the IT management and security domain, such as COBIT, ISO 27000, ITIL and so on. New and future technologies will be at the centre of our attention. This will be accompanied by a massive recruitment campaign, which we intend to launch soon. A new IT Recruitment Officer has started to operate in November, to find more people who are right for the company, and a new Pre-Sales Director is already targeting new customers.
Partnerships with major global players are being signed and intensified at this very moment. For example, we are about to sign a contract with Huawei in China, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure provider. CRI will set up a laboratory for enterprise data solutions in Luxembourg. We have also become partners with Engineering SpA, the largest software company in Italy and are looking forward to expanding our worldwide partnerships, particularly in the United Kingdom and Belgium.
For 2012, the main point of our strategy is ensuring business and ‘making your business happen’ – which is also our new slogan. From now on, we want to attract at least three new large customers per year. We want to be always a step ahead in technology. We want to stay close to our customers, something that CRI has always done, and accompany the growth of our customers by helping them with the right technologies. We want to be partners, not suppliers. For this we need the right people on the right projects – but also at the right price.
Content Studio: What can the company expect to gain from this new strategy?
Stefano Bodrato: With the integration of CRI (Luxembourg) S.A. into the CRI Group and the new company strategy, we expect to regain the speed the company had before the year 2001. Now we want to regain this lost share, but not only that: we expect 30% more profit compared to the profit line the company used to have during its 30 years of operations. In fact, by 2014, we want to more than double the size of the company and make 20 million euros per year – CRI alone, without the group.
Content Studio: Will CRI ‘stay local’ or open offices in other European countries?
Stefano Bodrato: CRI will largely ‘stay in its market’, meaning in the BeLux countries. We intend to make CRI a key player in the public and private markets there. The company has been a key player in the institutional market for decades, but now our plan is also to conquer the private market. We are actually opening a CRI office in Brussels at the end of December 2011, because our customers need us to be present locally. This will be very beneficial for our customer relationships and we are very excited about it.
Content Studio: What are the core values of the ‘new CRI’?
Stefano Bodrato: The core values of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ CRI have not changed. We want to be a partner, not a supplier. Being trustworthy has always been one of CRI’s major values, something the company is known for and something we like to transmit in our day-to-day operations.
Content Studio: Finally, what would be your welcome message to CRI’s personnel?
Stefano Bodrato: A merger is always an exciting moment for a company. Some people react enthusiastically, others become afraid. This is normal, and this is the moment to transmit important messages. What I would like to say to all CRI personnel is that I find it remarkable that the company has managed to establish such a strong bond with its employees, and CRI employees with their customers, for more than 30 years. People who started with the company from the beginning are still around. This is a remarkable achievement and something very characteristic about the company.
I am proud to have become part of such a company and I would like to use this as a good example to built upon. Talking about some more practical aspects, I would like to inform everyone, especially the people from CRI headquarters in Dommeldange/Luxembourg that we are planning to do some renovation work on the building. We intend to give our offices a makeover and make them even lighter and brighter. We want our employees to be happy, smiley and proud to work for CRI! In this sense, I wish us all to have an excellent cooperation.
This interview was conducted by Content Studio, CRI’s Editorial department.