REATA sat down with Frédéric Vermenouze of Blu Age to talk about international business and breaking into the American market. It's tough enough to start a new location for your business, it's even harder from another country! Having an experienced, local expert on your side can make all the difference!
Blu Age Corporation is a software editor. We have a software that helps us modernize legacy applications, legacy code like COBOL to new technologies, web technologies like G2E and dot net structure.
We are based out of Paris, France where we have a major part of our staff. We are also present in Morocco. We have about 30 people based in Morocco and 70 in France. We are now 12 people in the U.S. from a starting group of about two or three two years ago. The U.S. is a very important market or us. We are growing with our partners, which are Accenture, HP Enterprise Services, and MagicDraw.
The software market in the U.S. is about 60 or 70% of software market in the world. It’s still very big. We started working and our first major partner in the U.S. is HP Enterprise Services where we have a very big project that’s been ongoing for two years.
The first thing REATA did was to find something very close to HP because we are on the HP compound, and the HP building are right next to us. The second thing that was important for Blu Age was at the time we had this major contract with HP, but we didn’t have a very big pipe here in the U.S. and we wanted to find a contract that was not too long. REATA helped us in finding a sublease at a very interesting price. In fact, we are happy with the sublease because now we are going to renew that contract into a full lease for the same offices.
I’m not used to the U.S. market. I’m not used to the way things work here in the U.S. There are a lot of contractor aspects and working with REATA we established a trust relation that has simplified for us all those aspects. We had some minor issues with our tenant at one point. They were supposed to take out some of the equipment from the building we were leasing. It was stated in the contract that this should be done by the tenant, and when we asked them to do that, they said, “Okay, we’re going to bill you for that.” Bob resolved the issue and they went ahead and cleaned up the building for us at no charge.
Definitely I would recommend REATA to other clients or to some of my partners.
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