# OneView Group PLC Q&A with Chief Operating Officer Linda Palanza (LON:ONEV)

- Link: https://www.directorstalkinterviews.com/oneview-group-plc-qa-chief-operating-officer-linda-palanza-lononev/412731602
- Published: 2017-07-10T13:02:07+01:00
- Author: Amilia Stone

**OneView Group PLC **(LON:ONEV) Chief Operating Officer Linda Palanza caught up
with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the background to the company,
their technology in the retail space, why big companies are buying their software,
their recent fundraise and an extensive & growing pipeline of new business

 

**Q1: Now Linda, first off, can you give us some background on OneView Group, what
do your software solutions do?**

**A1**: Our primary technology is all about the tools to run a retail store. So,
it’s everything from the tills to the cash management to being able to run those
tills so it’s really modernising the retail store and what’s most important is that
our shoppers today want to be highly connected to their mobile devices, to the online
store. What we do is bring that connectivity from the cloud into the store so that
retailers are far more connected to the customers as they go through their journey
of doing research online and then coming into the store and wanting to understand
who that customer is and to be able to better service them.

 

**Q2: So, would you describe your product as disruptive technology within the retail
space?**

**A2**: I think that’s a popular term but I absolutely think that is the case and
why do we say that? Well, most importantly is the customers that we brought to market
so our customers are the likes of Wickes in the UK, Molten Brown in the UK and Discount
Tire, $4.5 billion, the largest tyre in wheel retailer in the world. So, these are
customers to us who have gone out to market and looked at what’s available for them,
for their new store technology and didn’t see anything in these legacy vendors that
are out there.

What OneView did is we came into the market 3.5 years ago with a vision that the
store needed to really change their technology in order to better service its customer
and this is that customer that’s coming in with their mobile devices, comparing 
your website to you store and now having a lot of questions about why they’re different.
So, that was really where we were at, we had a vision on how to do that, we had 
a company with a lot of experience in software to be able to bring this solution
to market and that’s really what we’ve done. The likes of Discount Tire is going
to be going live in the fall, you’re going to see a store that’s going to make the
Apple store look like a dinosaur, it is just a complete digitisation of the store.

 

**Q3: You’re still a relatively new company yet a number of very large recognised
retailers have recently contracted with you, why do you think these big companies
are buying your software?**

**A3**: I truly think that the companies that have come on board, companies that
have capital to invest and have a vision that they have firmly bought into, that
if you don’t change your retail model you will not be around. So, I think we’ve 
seen that, we’ve seen it on the high street in the UK as well as here in North America
that the retailers that aren’t making these kind of technology changes are struggling,
if not closing stores and going away all together. So, what we found was that the
retailers that really joined up with us and partnered with us, these are not just
customers these are partners, they got that and they know they needed to really 
embrace technology in order to reinvent the store. That is the main reason why these
customers came on board and are really truly fantastic partners.

 

**Q4: Are your customer typically looking fat your new cloud solution?**

**A4**: Yes, so 90% of OneGroup’s clients are hosted with our solution now and we
only offer cloud-hosted or SaaS to our customers going forward, the only difference
between cloud-hosted and SaaS is that the larger customers want their own instance
where the SaaS customers can share an instance but have their own database. This
provides them with a tremendous amount of cost savings especially in terms of their
own internal people management, now their project teams can focus on what the business
needs to drive more revenue or to drive better customer service and not get bogged
down with the technology of the implementation. So, we’re very pleased and have 
seen a real jump this year, we’re going into this year with already over $3 million
of recurring revenue, which is very impressive for a company that’s just been marketing
their solution for just 3.5 years, and now we only offer cloud solution to the market.

 

**Q5: You’ve announced a substantial $4 million fundraiser in the last few days,
can you talk me through what the funds will be used for?**

**A5**: Absolutely, so the fundraiser’s actually $5 million and the primary focus
of the fundraise is to build out our sales and marketing, we feel strongly that 
after the investments we’ve made over this 3.5 years with our bid partner customers,
our product now is ready for the general market. So, we’ll be building out more 
sales presence in the UK and the US and building out our partner channel to better
support our global partners, we have over 25 partners now globally who refer us 
into opportunities and assist us in our implementations.

Secondly, we will continue to invest in the product itself, we are ahead of the 
market and we need to stay ahead of the market and there’s still a lot to do in 
terms of embracing technology within the retail space.

 

**Q6: You also talk in your results announcement about an extensive and growing 
pipeline of new business for OneView Group, can you give us an indication of the
size of the pipeline?**

**A6**: Yes, so the pipeline right now stands at well north of $25 million. When
I define the pipeline, I guess I could say is that means that these are customers
that are engaging with us, have a RFI out in the market which is a Request for Information,
which generally turns into an RFP which is a Request for Price which then goes into
a shortlist software selection process and then ultimately, you’re selected.

So, about 30% of our pipeline is made up of RFI’s and RFP’s with decisions in about
6 months, there’s another 30% who are in the process of releasing RFI’s or FPI’s
and then the final 30% are those same partners that we’ve talked about, these larger
organisations who are architecting their stores of the future. They’re working very
close with us on what we’ve already done with our customers and these are quite 
exciting opportunities because we come in quite early and although they’re long 
sales cycles, we have a very good close rate with those types of retailers because
we’re engaged with them so early in the process.

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