Arria NLG Plc (LON:NLG) Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Gould caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the new framework agreement, the Genpact contract, structural differences and what’s in store for 2016
Q1: First off, I must say a Happy New Year to you and the team at Arria NLG and what a great way to start 2016 with a new framework agreement. Can you tell us a bit more about the contract?
A1: Sure, quite exciting, a lot of people working over the Christmas break to make it happen. So two big deals over the sort of Christmas period, one of course with Genpact which we’ll chat about later but the one that came in this week was with a large utility company in the USA. What’s particularly exciting about that one is that it is a domain in some ways that Arria is very used to so mission critical environment, heavy industry, rotating equipment, where we are taking engineers and making their expertise part of our artificial intelligence and reporting on their mission critical systems. So we’re used to doing that but this is our first big utilities client, our previous clients like that have been oil and has so exciting to have another big client in the US, very positive news that’s in utilities because of course there’s a lot of those globally and we’re keen that our software proves its worth in that environment because it’ll be able to be used in similar environments worldwide.
Q2: Now you rounded off last year with an exciting new contract with Genpact in the Christmas week, can you tell us what this entails for Arria and how the initial work on the applications is going?
A2: Genpact are a great partner for us, they’re a smart company, they’re a growing company, they are a firm that is already plugged in to Fortune 500 companies; large to mid sizes companies globally, right where the Natural Language Generation use cases makes sense so they’re already working a BPO and so on and that’s where we want to be so we’re part of that process of improving the intelligence of business systems of automating the reports that come out of everything, from SAP to Oracle to the accounting systems themselves, so they already do all of that. So they’re bringing to us use cases that our platform sales folk can turn into deals for their clients so it’s not just Genpact as a customer, it’s Genpact as a global sales channel for us. If you recall, we sell three things at Arria, we sell our platform as bespoke services so we build it for you and that’s what we’ll be doing initially with Genpact mainly around financial analytics. We also have our build-it-yourself solutions coming to market this year, that’s our software development toolkit and we’re putting in a lot of effort to training practices within Genpact, they’ve got some very smart people there, some great developers, and we’ll be training their developers to able to build solutions for their clients directly and so we’ll just sell licences through them as well. So Genpact support both those business models for us, our platform sales and our SDK sales when that comes to market.
Q3: Excellent. Ok, is there a structural difference between the deal with Genpact and the deal that you announced yesterday?
A3: Well they’re both framework agreements and they both have, as their starting point, statements of work for specific business services, specific use cases, but where one is a multi-channel engagement with Genpact, we really see them as a global partner, that will allow us to realise our product platform, SDK, strategy in calendar ‘16 and beyond, they have that dedicated account management, they will be training their own sales force, their own business development folk, in how to promote our stuff so that’s great. The power utility in the United States is much more a traditional Arria NLG customer, they’re big, they’re smart, they’ve got engineers, they can afford the top shelf services that we provide to build bespoke NLG systems for the and the will very quickly realise that strong business use case that NLG provides. So the outcomes are quite different even if they’re both described as framework agreements but very positive in terms of the revenue profile for Arria, sort of in ’16 but more in FY18 and ’19, it’s the revenue from the licencing compounds that we push through both of those framework agreements.
Q4: So all in all it’s a strong start to the New Year for Arria NLG Plc, what else do you have in store for 2016?
A4: It’s pretty exciting and we talked about it before but I’m in the privileged position of seeing on a daily basis what our labs in Sydney are coming up with, what Arria labs are coming up with. We’ve got some very exciting products coming to market as our own SaaS solutions in May/June that are hitting at a very large market in terms of ubiquity so financial analysis automated reporting on top of a whole range of standard financial solutions with some very interesting partners there. Also, the developer tools that are coming out of Sydney and Aberdeen offices as well are increasingly sophisticated and we’re going to make it increasingly easy for a whole range of clients globally, development houses and just web owners, to automate narrative content from their data so first time our clients will be moving from those larger multi-nationals; big oil and gas, big utilities, big partners like IMB, who are a wonderful partner to us, and Genpact too, to large marketing companies, large real estate firms, huge media companies, middle-sized media companies, large accounting firms, medium-sized accountancy firms, will be able to discover us online and be able to automate their reporting using the tools that we’re bringing out of our developer cloud in 2016. So lots to look out for, we’re doing what we said we were doing, we’re bringing in those big platform clients and you’ll see the announcements and IP announcements, patent announcements, product announcements will keep coming out month on month through this year, so a big year for Arria NLG.
