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Hedley Apperly, vice president of products and marketing at Atego, talks to Steve Rogerson in our series of interviews for CIEonline.
Hedley Apperly has been with Atego – or Artisan Software Tools as it was known – since 2008. Before that, he spent six years with Select Business Solutions as its senior vice president and general manager. He has also worked for Aonix, Princeton Softech, Select Software Tools, Royscot Trust, Dataflow Information Systems and RHP. He was educated at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham, and his hobbies include teaching canoeing and power boating.
1. Why did Artisan Software Tools change its name to Atego?
We merged with Aonix. I’d been the vice president of marketing at Artisan and previously at Aonix. It was a sensible strategic merger. Coming up with the name involved a long period for me over Christmas 2009 trying to find something that wasn’t registered as a URL, began with an A and was acceptable to the management of both companies. There was no meaning to the word, but there were limits to what we could find.
2. You were part of the EU’s Interested project. How important are collaborative projects for driving the industry forwards?
They are very important. We probably drive about 25 to 30 per cent of our product roadmaps from collaborative projects. We propose some of these projects and they give us funding. The partners include software tool vendors, three or four universities and a handful of industrial companies, real companies who will be implementing the technology. They give us access not only to academics and partners but also real end users. It is a very good networking opportunity.
We have achieved customer sales through being on these projects. We have generated real business from people we have met on the programmes. We are on around ten at the moment. It is not all rosy because there is a lot of hard work.
The other downside is they last three years, which is longer than most product plans so you have to guess if something will still be relevant in three years’ time. You have to sometimes change course in the last year depending on what is happening. It drifts with different companies having their own agendas.
3. Part of your role is looking at potential software companies for acquisition or merger. Do you think this is the best way to expand rather than growing organically?
Probably not the best way, but it is something that you need to do. Economies of scale are important. For example, we have a small team in Italy and we need to grow there. We can try to recruit people or acquire an organisation. The latter can speed things up. We need to build our portfolio, and it can help to fill gaps through acquisitions. We are building a product family so we don’t go for tools we already have. We look for a good strategic fit that fills gaps our customers have asked for.
4. What attracted you to canoeing?
I started when I was about 13 years old in the Scouts. But I had 30 years away from it with family and children, which was far too long. But as I enjoyed it while I was young, I decided to introduce my daughters to it. I thought I’d better do it safely, so I took some coaching courses and now I’m an active coach in two clubs. My daughters still have their boats, but one is 15 and the other 18 and boyfriends and homework take priority.
I go canoeing myself about twice a week. I find the coaching very rewarding. It is not different from my job in that there is a lot of management, coaching, meetings, but you need to be able to do it yourself as well.
5. The economists are saying we are heading into a new recession. Coming so soon after the last one, how bad do you think this will be for industry in the UK?
Pretty bad. We are finding the types of tool purchases are changing, so rather than buying tools for the daily job they are more for improving the production, doing more with less. It is more about how to be more productive. They have fewer people and need to be more productive with whom they have left. They have the same deadlines so they have to change the way they do it.
