Integrated since 2013 into the Océane Consulting group, the Océane Consulting Data Management subsidiary is a digital services company (ESN) integrator and publisher, Pure Player Dematerialization & Digitalization. Since 2017, Frédérick Oberty has been its Managing Director. With 25 years of diverse experience in the IT world with business/management responsibilities to start with and executive/shareholder responsibilities over the last 15 years, Frédérick Oberty provides an overview of the company's expertise and presents its strengths and distinctive features.
Can you describe the positioning and offering of Océane Consulting Data Management?
Frédérick Oberty - When I arrived, this structure consisted of a technical platform in Rennes which included 15 experts with Electronic Document Management (EDM) as its core business. The offering was therefore limited, and clients were too few and too local.
Starting from this platform which constituted an excellent foundation, we built a more global positioning through expansion. We are today a digital services company integrator of partner solutions and connector publisher with positioning as a pure player in Dematerialization & Digitalization. Let's be clear, we do not publish solutions, we publish connectors that allow interconnection of our partners' solutions. Our offering has therefore expanded considerably and includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition), ADR (Automatic Document Recognition), ECM (Enterprise Content Management), BPM (Business Process Management), RPA (Robotic Process Automation), historical EDM (Electronic Document Management), AI for document services (Artificial Intelligence) notably semantic or automatic recognition, Big Data by nature given the explosion in volume of data notably unstructured... Our Rennes platform has grown to 40 experts to date to support this development.
What are the drivers of such an expansion of your offering?
FO - We have adopted a 360° vision and approach to develop our offering. This vision first integrates technical expertise and R&D, as well as business and financing dimensions, and for the past year much more active digital communication... In short, it is a global vision and a virtuous circle that enabled rapid expansion of our offering. Interaction with other subsidiaries of the group also plays a predominant role in terms of access to common large account references. All these assets and driving elements gave a significant boost to our development.
You previously mentioned the interconnection of your partners' solutions. Who are they and what relationships do you maintain with them?
FO - We work in close collaboration with historical partner solutions such as Nuxeo/Hyland (ECM platform) and Bonitasoft (BPM platform). These close historical partnerships constitute the strategic pivots of our development. Of course, we constantly develop new partnerships to be in line with the constant technological changes in our sector and respond to increasingly complex demands from our clients and prospects. These include Hyperscience (AI recognition of handwritten documents...), Expert.ai (semantic AI), Docaposte Fast (secure exchange of dematerialized documents), Cecurity.com (electronic archiving, electronic safes...), Oodrive (electronic signature...), and recently the unicorn LumApps (social and collaborative intranet)...
Is there an obligation for a company or organization in the private or public sector to transition to document dematerialization?
FO - Beyond ecological, economic or organizational considerations, there are indeed regulatory aspects to comply with, notably the Public Action 2022 law which requires all companies and all local authorities to dematerialize their documents.
Q - What makes Océane Consulting Data Management distinctive?
FO - If we go beyond our targeted expertise in cutting-edge solutions, our technical platform in Brittany, located in Cesson-Sévigné, is resolutely a specificity that we display loud and clear! At Océane Consulting Data Management, no service is outsourced offshore. It is essential, rare and highly differentiating at a time when many of our competitors outsource at low cost to distant countries for often mediocre quality.
The technical platform is organized around a Technical Department, a Projects Department and 6 Centers of Expertise notably around our partner solutions, all in an Open Source and Java environment. Our service offering is complete and diversified: technical expertise and audit very often to open new accounts, migration and integration projects that are much more significant, recurring multi-year maintenance contracts, managed remote technical support from the platform which are particularly booming in the age of remote working... to name just these examples.
This Breton anchoring, this "Brittany" brand of which we are proud, is a real singularity that creates a culture of proximity management, team cohesion, daily teamwork, problem-solving interaction. The bonds between employees are strong. Most of our employees and technical experts have over 10 years of seniority, which is also rare and worth noting in our sector.
Q - What are the emerging challenges and growth prospects in your sector?
FO - Artificial Intelligence (AI) is today at the heart of all our activities: business, expertise, responses to calls for proposals, projects, deliverables or training. It is a major development in recent years. Everything related to AI - and also to Big Data - plays a key role in data and document management.
The document and data are at the heart of our activities and challenges. We must constantly evolve on these increasingly vast and complex issues. For example, the latest partnership recently developed with Hyperscience allows us to master and propose a disruptive and promising solution in reading and recognizing documents notably handwritten ones (CERFA, medical claim forms...).
Finally, our latest R&D focus is on 2 key aspects currently: document fraud and increasingly optimized security of the applications we deliver.
Q - What is the type of your clients and contracts?
FO - We intervene for both the public and private sectors, which each represent approximately half of our clients.
Our revenue, at 4 million euros, is 2.5 times higher than in 2017 and with very good prospects for the coming years. We have around thirty active clients. 60% of our revenue comes from multi-year contracts and services. This recurrence is a sign of our clients' trust. All this positions us as a serious regional and national player and we have been experiencing increasing development internationally for 2 years.
Our ideal targets are public organizations and mid-sized companies (SMEs) with 1,000 to 10,000 employees. We work for many subsidiaries of large groups (CNP, VINCI, SNCF, ENGIE, TOTAL Energies, WABTEC...), Territorial Authorities, Regional Councils, Metropolitan Communities such as those in Ile de France, Niort or La Manche for example. Large Public Agencies such as the National Food Safety Agency (ANSES), the National Radio Frequency Agency (ANFR) or AFNOR are among our clients. Many schools and universities as well. These examples are not exhaustive of course.
Moreover, we have been in a phase of significant professionalization and optimization of our communication for the past year via the automated CRM tool Hubspot and LinkedIn. We also organize webinars, participate in trade shows and seminars to be more present and visible. Expertise is a strength, making it known supports our development and growth.
Q - You are strongly established throughout France through your expertise and ability to respond to complex requests. Have you also developed international activity?
FO - We now operate throughout France and even Europe and the Middle East, representing 15% of our revenue. The countries in which we operate are Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Belgium and Saudi Arabia.
Q - How do you remain competitive and at the forefront of technology?
FO - Training is essential to follow the developments of the solutions we recommend and use. This is why 2 to 3 formal and traditional training sessions are provided every year for each employee on the developments of our partner solutions such as Nuxeo and Bonitasoft or on generic tools or methods.
Furthermore, being in targeted expertise that is evolving very rapidly, we provide targeted training every month in the form of technical workshops - around ten per year - based on examples of current client requests. These workshops effectively participate in constantly updating our employees on developments in new technologies, their uses or on specific and recurring points with our clients and prospects. Finally, the Technical Department addresses on a daily basis very specific problems encountered individually by employees at a client for sessions not exceeding ½ hour with a focus on efficiency.
We rely on training implemented quickly. Training must be implemented immediately so that employees fully appropriate it with the ultimate goal of better responding to the technical and operational challenges of clients.
