We are excited to introduce Paul Depré, Managing Director of Globant France. Paul is leading business development strategy and managing the overall client relationship to boost our business in France.
- Tell us about your professional background before joining Globant.
Funny story, I joined Globant twice! Before my first time as a Glober, I used to be an Executive Game Producer at a gaming company in Argentina. I managed a team of more than 70 people delivering premium mobile games.
After more than 5 years spent at Globant, I came back to France, and I held the role of Product Manager consultant in a very well-known thought leadership consulting firm. I helped the company grow from 8 to 60 consultants and built and led the Design Sprint practice. During that journey, I mostly worked for the largest insurance company in the world, Co-managing their digital accelerator factory.
- What makes Globant so different?
The first thing that comes to my mind is the people. Globant is full of brilliant and diverse people, eager to challenge the status quo and seek reinvention constantly. Despite being a company of over 23,000 Globers, you always feel the breath of entrepreneurship in every team and project!
- What brings Globant to the French business ecosystem?
France is market-driven by substantial global tech companies and more minor and niche consulting firms with a very high level of technical expertise. Globant brings the best of those two worlds: a complete portfolio of modern and high-value tech services combined with the ability to scale super fast.
We are also sensing a need for reinvention from customers and French organizations to modernize their technologies or create digital tools and uncover new business models driven by digital and data. In other words, they are reinventing their industries which is an area where we excel!
- What kind of customers are Globant working with? What are they looking for in Globant?
In France, we believe the market is highly compatible with Globant offerings. We are collaborating with the CAC40 companies to support their digital reinvention, particularly in financial services and healthcare.
Also, our agile and entrepreneur DNA makes us very appealing for scale-ups to support their exponential growth and internationalization; France is the 2nd largest startups hub in Europe!
- How does an innovation company innovate?
Innovation is a mindset supported by a series of tools and frameworks. As said before, innovation runs in our veins, and one of our secret ingredients is cross-pollination. Our mission is to bring innovation, products, or practices that are successful in one industry into others. We land this mission and vision through our Agile Pods, which are multi-disciplinary teams with different backgrounds, skills, and experiences.
- What is Globant’s approach towards sustainability? Do you help companies transition to sustainable processes, and how are you transitioning yourself?
Globant has been investing heavily in sustainability for our customers and our organization.
Our Sustainable Business Studio ensures that organizations understand the challenge ahead, from the C level and top management to the delivery and commercial teams. We have also developed our digital sobriety framework to build software and digital products sustainably.
As an organization, we are taking sustainability as a high-priority topic. Be it in our methodologies, tools, and daily life, we are measuring our impact on the environment and communities. We also have some reflections on how we could integrate sustainability as part of our compensation model.
- What are the biggest challenges you foresee in France’s business ecosystem in the coming years?
The French Government and tier 1 organizations have been heavily encouraging the startup ecosystem to cope with the digital challenge. We now see the fruits of those initiatives with a rising amount of unicorns in our country. It is now essential to make this sustainable by integrating them into the economy, empowering real and impactful partnerships with CAC40 and French institutions to help them grow and create more jobs. As discussed above, Globant has a role in supporting its growth and connecting its products to global initiatives.
The second challenge ahead of France is the ability to leverage a robust and well-known educational ecosystem to provide the talent that will lead the future and the digital transnational. Initiatives such as Ecole42 are unique and should become a reference in terms of new ways to train digital and IT talent. We are also legitimate to create more partnerships with universities to connect them with the professional and corporate world, as we do in many other territories.
Last but not least, France must empower the reinvention of Europe and the EU model. We know that the path is long, but we should all work towards a European model with more harmonization and respecting local identities simultaneously, putting environment and sustainability and digital as the engines of this new economy!
- What are the professional profiles that Globant is looking for in France?
We are looking at building a solid local team to understand our customers and define their digital strategy. We have already recruited our core team, but as our business grows exponentially, we are hiring for several positions and hope to complete our leadership team very soon. Globant is also looking to bring local digital talent to build those solutions, understanding the specificities of our market and culture. This process is already ongoing, and we are also putting a specific focus on M&A and acquiring French companies who bring high value to the market.
