Mercury Gate International will continue to expand this year, according to President and CEO Joe Juliano.
The company, a leading independent Transportation Management System (TMS) provider, earned a spot in FreightWaves’ FreightTech25, taking 25th place. Juliano told FreightWaves that more expansion and innovation are coming in 2020, with the focus on Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
“Mercury Gate is deployed in 126 different countries so our solution is certainly an international solution deployed around the world in many different places,” he said. “But our footprint for sales service and localized support is really concentrated in the United States.
“[But] there’s been a lot of interest in Europe so earlier in [2019] we established our European entity, and we are in the process of finding people as well as expertise within that region.”
As Juliano acknowledges, for U.S. companies to successfully expand into Europe, they must take a professional approach — formulate a strategy, take a long-term view and make sure all employees understand that Europe should be treated not as a single entity, but as a diverse and complex region.
“Our European headquarters will be in the U.K., but you don’t go to Europe, you go to multiple countries, and we’ll be going into specific countries in Europe,” he said.
Juliano is well placed to lead the growth. Prior to joining Mercury Gate, he was an executive-in-residence with Summit’s growth equity team, where he was charged with identifying innovative, high-growth application software businesses. He also offers three decades of leadership experience delivering business-to-business application software solutions to large enterprises, including serving as president and CEO of IQNavigator, a provider of SaaS technology and services.
To drive the international expansion, Simon Fahie has been appointed managing director and charged with building out the organization. Fahie’s supply-chain experience in technology organizations, spanning more than 20 years, includes starting, building and operating teams in EMEA, Asia Pacific and North America. He also restructured and grew IQNavigator’s European-based team.
Asked if there was a timetable as to how Mercury Gate will roll out its various offerings internationally, Juliano was direct: “We’ve already started the process of interviewing and hiring people in Europe so organically we will grow our personal footprint for sales and service in Europe, and we are also looking for M&A opportunities in Europe as well.
“We’re not looking to buy another TMS — ours is a very good, top-notch TMS — we are looking for additional product functionality that surrounds the TMS and that we can offer to our customers both in EMEA as well as our customers around the world.”