Navigating Growth with Cloud Solutions
Christian Primeau, CEO of Syntax — a leading global technology and solutions services provider speaks to Wall Street Journal about how they rethought the approach to cloud solutions, to focus on rapid growth. Download the DocumentChristian, what challenges do fast-
growing companies like Syntax face
from a tech perspective?
Six acquisitions in six years is fantastic, but it put
a lot of pressure on us. Every time we acquired a
business, we added different processes, systems
and ways of managing data.
That left us with different versions of the truth,
making it time-consuming to understand what’s
happening with the business around the world. We
needed to streamline our ability to report and get
How one tech services provider
rethought its own approach to cloud
solutions, focusing on rapid growth
and time to value.
Navigating
Growth With
Cloud Solutions
This article was previously published on partners.wsj.com on September 3, 2024. Custom Content from WSJ is a unit of The Wall Street Journal
Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.
Syntax — a leading global technology and
solutions services provider — knows a lot
about navigating growth. The Montreal-
based company has grown organically to
strengthen core competencies and also through
acquisition-based market expansion, acquiring
six other companies over the past six years.
As a result, Syntax has ballooned from 150
employees to nearly 3,000 today.
Global CEO Christian Primeau recently
explained the importance of growing companies
choosing the right cloud solutions to manage
their growth — and how Syntax did it.
growing companies like Syntax face
from a tech perspective?
Six acquisitions in six years is fantastic, but it put
a lot of pressure on us. Every time we acquired a
business, we added different processes, systems
and ways of managing data.
That left us with different versions of the truth,
making it time-consuming to understand what’s
happening with the business around the world. We
needed to streamline our ability to report and get
How one tech services provider
rethought its own approach to cloud
solutions, focusing on rapid growth
and time to value.
Navigating
Growth With
Cloud Solutions
This article was previously published on partners.wsj.com on September 3, 2024. Custom Content from WSJ is a unit of The Wall Street Journal
Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.
Syntax — a leading global technology and
solutions services provider — knows a lot
about navigating growth. The Montreal-
based company has grown organically to
strengthen core competencies and also through
acquisition-based market expansion, acquiring
six other companies over the past six years.
As a result, Syntax has ballooned from 150
employees to nearly 3,000 today.
Global CEO Christian Primeau recently
explained the importance of growing companies
choosing the right cloud solutions to manage
their growth — and how Syntax did it.
insights on what was going on with the business,
and to leverage this amazing human capital that
we have around the world. Having a centralized
system with data we can trust and leverage in real
time was critical to us staying agile. More broadly,
our challenges mirror those of our customers. How
does technology increase efficiency? Decrease
cost? Provide better data for decision-making, so
we can deliver faster for our constituents?
How is growth challenging from an
employee perspective, and how do
you deal with that?
The fundamental thing, at risk of sounding
obvious, is change is super hard. Leaders must
help employees absorb the change — to make sure
that we’re driving the change into the organization
and working on the business, not just in the
business. Freeing up time for our best employees
to understand new processes and winning over the
evangelists allows us to percolate transformation
throughout the business. It’s something we preach
to our customers every day, but living it ourselves is
a very good reminder. Transformation and growth
are driven by human beings — employees — so
winning them over and constantly reminding them
why we’re doing this and the outcomes we’re trying
to achieve is incredibly important.
What pressure does growth place
on the company’s technological
architecture? How can you use
technology to relieve pain points as
they arise?
Especially during times of fast growth, we need
to be able to securely handle the growing volume
of both data and transactions while trusting the
environment and the data source — not only for
performance reasons but also for governance. We
have to be able to scale and remain agile, which
is pivotal to our growth. Thankfully, the cloud and
artificial intelligence tools available today make
that architecture possible.
I think the key to using technology effectively
is making sure to align processes to business
objectives and to understand what you are trying
to achieve. We’ve followed the same advice we give
our customers: Leverage technology that is already
available so you can focus on your core capabilities,
your intellectual effort and the creativity of your
employees. What do you build versus what do you
buy? Putting R&D toward your own capabilities and
expertise and not something others can do better
is very important — it’s how you create value and
differentiation in the market.
You’ve mentioned that choosing
cloud-based solutions is important to
growth. Why is that?
First is the higher innovation cycle. With cloud, you’re
getting the latest and greatest business processes,
automation, scalability, agility and performance. But
also, from a merger-and-acquisition perspective,
we have very quick integration cycles. Cloud allows
us to take advantage of the capabilities that we
just acquired and make them readily available to
our team and also our customers through new
offerings.
Security compliance concerns are another big
factor. The risks are greater when you expand
globally. We have more governance implications
and responsibilities both with investors and the
customers we’re supporting.
You chose the GROW with SAP
enterprise resource planning (ERP)
This article was previously published on partners.wsj.com on September 3, 2024. Custom Content from WSJ is a unit of The Wall Street Journal
Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.
Navigating Growth With Cloud Solutions
and to leverage this amazing human capital that
we have around the world. Having a centralized
system with data we can trust and leverage in real
time was critical to us staying agile. More broadly,
our challenges mirror those of our customers. How
does technology increase efficiency? Decrease
cost? Provide better data for decision-making, so
we can deliver faster for our constituents?
How is growth challenging from an
employee perspective, and how do
you deal with that?
The fundamental thing, at risk of sounding
obvious, is change is super hard. Leaders must
help employees absorb the change — to make sure
that we’re driving the change into the organization
and working on the business, not just in the
business. Freeing up time for our best employees
to understand new processes and winning over the
evangelists allows us to percolate transformation
throughout the business. It’s something we preach
to our customers every day, but living it ourselves is
a very good reminder. Transformation and growth
are driven by human beings — employees — so
winning them over and constantly reminding them
why we’re doing this and the outcomes we’re trying
to achieve is incredibly important.
What pressure does growth place
on the company’s technological
architecture? How can you use
technology to relieve pain points as
they arise?
Especially during times of fast growth, we need
to be able to securely handle the growing volume
of both data and transactions while trusting the
environment and the data source — not only for
performance reasons but also for governance. We
have to be able to scale and remain agile, which
is pivotal to our growth. Thankfully, the cloud and
artificial intelligence tools available today make
that architecture possible.
I think the key to using technology effectively
is making sure to align processes to business
objectives and to understand what you are trying
to achieve. We’ve followed the same advice we give
our customers: Leverage technology that is already
available so you can focus on your core capabilities,
your intellectual effort and the creativity of your
employees. What do you build versus what do you
buy? Putting R&D toward your own capabilities and
expertise and not something others can do better
is very important — it’s how you create value and
differentiation in the market.
You’ve mentioned that choosing
cloud-based solutions is important to
growth. Why is that?
First is the higher innovation cycle. With cloud, you’re
getting the latest and greatest business processes,
automation, scalability, agility and performance. But
also, from a merger-and-acquisition perspective,
we have very quick integration cycles. Cloud allows
us to take advantage of the capabilities that we
just acquired and make them readily available to
our team and also our customers through new
offerings.
Security compliance concerns are another big
factor. The risks are greater when you expand
globally. We have more governance implications
and responsibilities both with investors and the
customers we’re supporting.
You chose the GROW with SAP
enterprise resource planning (ERP)
This article was previously published on partners.wsj.com on September 3, 2024. Custom Content from WSJ is a unit of The Wall Street Journal
Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.
Navigating Growth With Cloud Solutions
solution as the right fit for Syntax.
Why?
We knew that SAP would allow us to run core
processes of our business out of the box, so things
like financial planning and reporting. We also
implemented SAP SuccessFactors to make sure we
could leverage everything related to our human
capital and talent of our team. Taking advantage of
SAP’s unified and centralized data system allowed
us to focus on expanding our business.
As implementation continues, we’re positioned to
see better visibility, more granularity and readily
available data, better reporting, faster month-end
close and faster payments from customers.
And resource management is a great example. We
need to keep our consultants around the world
busy and know what they’re working on and when
they have availability to take on new customer
projects. We had a whole bunch of different
systems managing that. So by implementing the
SAP S/4HANA public cloud through GROW with SAP
and one of its key resource-management modules,
we could integrate data sets and get visibility into
the availability of those consultants but also know
in real time where we stand on billing, training and
utilization.
But integrating ERP is not a finality — it’s a journey.
We believe in SAP’s vision for the solution around
continuous improvement and embedding more
and more AI. We’re not the kind of company
that has 400 people in its IT department. So the
ability to accelerate our time to value and have
a minimalistic team focused on maintaining the
application is what we were after.
This article was previously published on partners.wsj.com on September 3, 2024. Custom Content from WSJ is a unit of The Wall Street Journal
Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.
Navigating Growth With Cloud Solutions
Why?
We knew that SAP would allow us to run core
processes of our business out of the box, so things
like financial planning and reporting. We also
implemented SAP SuccessFactors to make sure we
could leverage everything related to our human
capital and talent of our team. Taking advantage of
SAP’s unified and centralized data system allowed
us to focus on expanding our business.
As implementation continues, we’re positioned to
see better visibility, more granularity and readily
available data, better reporting, faster month-end
close and faster payments from customers.
And resource management is a great example. We
need to keep our consultants around the world
busy and know what they’re working on and when
they have availability to take on new customer
projects. We had a whole bunch of different
systems managing that. So by implementing the
SAP S/4HANA public cloud through GROW with SAP
and one of its key resource-management modules,
we could integrate data sets and get visibility into
the availability of those consultants but also know
in real time where we stand on billing, training and
utilization.
But integrating ERP is not a finality — it’s a journey.
We believe in SAP’s vision for the solution around
continuous improvement and embedding more
and more AI. We’re not the kind of company
that has 400 people in its IT department. So the
ability to accelerate our time to value and have
a minimalistic team focused on maintaining the
application is what we were after.
This article was previously published on partners.wsj.com on September 3, 2024. Custom Content from WSJ is a unit of The Wall Street Journal
Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.
Navigating Growth With Cloud Solutions