We are moving to 5th year

Istanbul, 22 July 2020

TDG, a global leader in digital transformation, announced “a new age of TDG,  4th year is completed, we are moving to 5th”.

TDG is founded July 22nd, 2016. We interviewed with Batur Erdogan about past four years and future plans of the company. Here is the interview scripts of Batur Erdoğan, TDG Global CEO. Good reading…

Question – Good morning Batur, Getting to the next, when we are thinking last months, first I want to ask how are you?, how much of TDG’s workforce working from home? what is your message to them at this time?

Batur – Thanks Ecem, I am very well. So if you look at our workforce and if you look at the timing over the last four months it’s certainly been interesting this was not anticipated certainly end of January and right now we feel that we are in a good shape if I look at our workforce about 90% of our people were working remotely and from home. Until the last a few weeks we have managed to get all our employees at our locations and client sites because the services that they provide are absolutely essential to our clients so we’re really pleased with what we managed to do with our employees working remotely and be quite productive in that environment of course it is a testament to that we are “the company of the future”  what we made from the beginning of TDG, in our network, in our working structure, in remote working capabilities in all of those tools to work remotely and effectively I can say.

Question – You can be sensitive when it comes to financial questions ’cause you’ve got declare earnings in several days but I want to ask for a macro perspective how big of an economic shock are you reading this pandemic to be to the tech ecosystem?

Batur – I am not sensitive about the financials, we are an open company and we are sharing financial figures to all stakeholders. And I can say we closed 2019 with great success, our revenue stream did not grow too much due to recession on Euro and Turkish zone. But we were still profitable organization with 16.9% Net Income ratio we declared, and we see still strong financial robustness in 2020 although pandemic economic crisis is on the table. And I am sure, we will see more than 25% increase in our External Revenue figure for 2020. At the end of the quarter, everybody is going to take ahead from the future GDP issues if GDP goes down and some of the predictions are dire then obviously there will be some correlation it is hard to predict exactly how much.  The work we do though is quite essential so consequently we feel that we are well positioned to sort of this crisis and it’s hard to put any precise percentages on it right now. I think the next few months is going to tell us exactly how this is going to bear out.

Question – Absolutely, so let me ask you at the functional and micro level there do you expect that TDG is going to function differently as a result of this crisis whether it has to do with working from home drills preparedness use of a video or collaboration tools but how does it look from here?

Batur – So there is obviously going to be a lot more virtual work or remote work using all of these tools that you talk about if I look at the last few months. I mean I think we counted up more than hundreds hours of video conferencing going on, I think at any given time given our global workforce over VPN connections coming in. So, all of that is going to become sort of the way we will all get work done over the next few months not just us but our clients also. In addition to us and how we work with them we’re already seeing that this is resulting in people adapting and as they adapt to this new form of work. We find that they’re going to be productive and their resilient and so I especially enjoy. As all of that workforce is getting productive that they haven’t really missed a beat in our delivery to our clients in the services that they provide. And all of their interactions and in how to get work done and when we look at the usage of technology I think it is especially going to accelerate also not just us but how our clients are going to go on their digital transformations and this I believe this crisis is only going to accelerate that as we go over the next few months.

Question – Ask you about new names you have outlined this year in terms of organization. For example, Cem Danyal Arslan and Kenan Agyel is joined TDG. Cem is the head of UK & Ireland and Kenan is head of Germany. Can you tell us about further changes whether they’re going to be structural changes or maybe you’re not going to do that now. But what should we expect as far as the rhythm of that as the year progresses?

Batur – I’ve been quite clear any reference there are several fundamental journeys that all our clients are on the journey to AI, Cloud and IoT. Both names, Cem and Kenan announcement, you kind of got what we’re doing on the assets that we’re going to put in there. In addition to strategy as well as how it will be leading AI domain and being a new member of the team as we got take these assets forward. All of them, Cem, Kenan and other managers like Bulent, Emin, Didem are has a wonderful empathy with all of our clients and a lot of expertise in their industries and in providing these services to our clients so you can see that that is being put in place over there at this combination is then going to allow us leveraging all technologies because we do believe that as people embark on this transmission to digitalization loud there is going to be an architectural war and that war we believe the winning architecture is going to be TDG. As you can imagine we will continue to grow in terms of new geographies and new names will join us to change the world with green technologies of TDG.

Question – Into the gears of the business right there let’s keep talking about it because you did point out artificial intelligence, Cloud and IoT is being three areas where you said, you need to quote deepen our understanding now cloud and AI crowded fields right now,  what are TDG’s key assets you think that allow you to beat them there?

Batur – I see, a market always needs more than one player to form a market, I think. We came out about four years ago, we found the TDG on 22nd of July 2016, just like today. And we talked about healthy digitalization, transformation of all industries. Really bring a lot of complexity reduction or simplicity into how you get the work diploid, we believe that with Ecosh, Izzy and fiFist those three pieces are the correct architecture to go succeed and with the number of people we have in both the upstream open source as well as hardening those technologies into products that can be easily consumed by the enterprise. Those are some of the special kind of the special sauce that we bring to the mix but then even if you have all of the technology many of our clients are going to require expertise to help them which of the application should I migrate, which ones should I modernize, where is the return in terms of those applications that may need to scale up and down and, give me greater intimacy with all of my clients and we bring a lot of the expertise to do that with our services teams as well as help our clients then run this new infrastructure in a much more effective and efficient way than they could really providing both resiliency and mobile organization.

Question -With the new era of world and all the past experiences, could you please put what is your wide view of your plan for the future?

Batur – OK, we made a long run plan 4 years ago, and it covers all of these crisis, increase, boom, and recession. We have a target to year 2058 that we will be in global Top10 tech companies list. And we are and we will only execute the plan until this date. We have made several acquisitions that we will announce in the following weeks. We have made several new products like Ecosh, Izzy and fiFist, you will see the progress on these product families in following years. We have launched several new services in D-del. We have made a lot of contribution to society with Coder in Action, with TDG University. Coders are showing great empathy and support to Coder in Action Programs they are supporting the resilience of all Covid happenings for example. I appreciate all of them. So, all are show us how robust organization we are, we will continue to progress just like this in the future.

Question – Finally number of companies have talked about the need to have assets closer as a result of this crisis over the past several years TDG has done more global expansion moved a lot of jobs in other areas around the world, do you see TDG reversing that are growing more in the region like Turkey as a result of this crisis or now.

Batur – Ecem we tend to follow wherever we can find optimum skills so we hire or have been always hiring people is based on where we can find talent with the right skills it’s not a question of globalization or going to any specific location and the ability to do remote work has been a fundamental part of what we’ve been doing for four years so if we have a great pocket where we can find talent we’re probably going to go there and be able to do that whether it’s the top universities in this country, the universities in Europe, Asia or US warning about people which we call sort of new color.

About TDG

TDG was established to accelerate healthy technology development in society. TDG aims to be the world leader in technology development and execution in the field while providing services and solutions in consulting, system integration and business processes management.

TDG, operating in EU and US, offers services and solutions to companies from diverse sectors including manufacturing, finance, sports, health, retail, distribution, media, space, telecom and logistics with its expertise and industry knowledge in the field of technology. In Technology Development Group, people, technology and business are working together to accelerate “Proactive Innovation“​ and we are a “Trusted Partner“​ for organizations to create their firm of the future, and we are the best place to work for employees. Technology Development Group commits to provide high performance to its stakeholders (customers, employees, community, and shareholders) with high ethical and responsible company policies.

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