a new eye on investments

IN THIS EDITION

1Newion Investments Management Intro-

duction and Investment Focus

2Newion II invests in

iWelcome Series A round

Newion II acquires stake in

Reasult Holding

3, 4 & 5EMEA enterprise IT budget and cloud

computing survey results 2012 and 2013

compared

6 & 7Newion News Flash

8Contact Newion

Newion invests in fast growing B2B/ enter-

prise software vendors.

Our current fund, Newion Investments II, is

focusing on investing in early stage or

expansion stage business technology

companies concentrating on innovative

business-to-business software. Invest-

ment rounds for the afore mentioned

target group range from EUR 500.000 to

EUR 5.000.000 in some cases in co-operati-

on with partnering investors. Geographical

we are primarily focusing on the Benelux

and co-investments in Northern Europe.

We want to contribute to building strong

companies with sustainable growth. “Con-

trolled growth” is an important aspect of

our investment philosophy; we invest on

a step-by-step approach over several dif-

ferent Financing Rounds. We believe in de-

ploying the right amount of funding at the

corresponding stages of the development

of companies; finding, proving or scaling

their proposition. We generally take mino-

rity stakes. Our investment horizon is five

to seven years.

Newion Investments Management Introduction and Investment Focus

Businesspark Friesland West 27B

8466 SL Nijehaske

The Netherlands

Luchthavenweg 81, 138

5657 EA Eindhoven

The Netherlands

VISITING ADDRESS:

News for Investors

September 2013

Questions? Call us:+31 513 640 633

Our team

Patrick Polak

Managing Partner

Jaap van Barneveld

Managing Partner

Frank Claassen

Investment Director Partner

Erik Aeyelts Averink

Venture Partner

Geert Zanting

Controller

On 18 December 2012 iWelcome, the Euro-

pean Identity as a Service provider (IDaaS)

and Newion Investments and Filsa Capital

closed a Series A investment round. The

funding will be used to boost development

capability, accelerate growth in the Nether-

lands and fuel European expansion.

iWelcome provides a cloud based Identity

and Access management (IAM) service that

allows organisations to securely and ef-

ficiently manage employee, partner and

customer credentials and access rights

across internal-, external and cloud applica-

tions. The iWelcome platform is architected

as a generic cloud service, yet accommo-

dates the extensive security and integra-

tion requirements of enterprise customers.

Therefore the iWelcome platform is architec-

ted bearing the complexity and the specific

requirements of these customers in mind. In

order to comply with security- and privacy

regulations, iWelcome is ISO 27001 certified

and hosted in the Netherlands,” said Danny

de Vreeze, CEO of iWelcome.

“Whereas our vision is already supported by

prospects, customers and analyst, with this

investment iWelcome has secured sufficient

funding to enhance its ability to execute.”

Patrick Polak, Managing Partner at Newion

Investments: ”On one side we see the cloud

becoming a dominant way to adopt busi-

ness applications. And, on the other side

we see the security and privacy threats that

full-scale use of cloud applications brings

along. Perimeter control by implementing

strong Identity and Access Management

capability therefore is key! iWelcome ad-

dresses this challenge and hence is a va-

luable addition to Newion’s investment

portfolio.”

Newion II invests in iWelcome Series A round

portfolio overview

2

Newion II acquires stake in Reasult HoldingOn 2 May 2013 Reasult, the supplier of real

estate software and Newion Investments

agreed on an equity transaction by which

Newion acquired an interest in Reasult.

Newion acquired the shareholdings of a

number of shareholders in Reasult Holding

B.V. and has thereby gained a significant mi-

nority stake.

Aart Zandbergen, Managing Director of

Reasult, said that he was delighted with the

arrival of Newion Investments as a share-

holder. “Reasult has built up an important

position in the real estate market with re-

gard to software for forecasting and analysis

and wants to further expand this position.

An experienced and professional software

investor like Newion Investments will ena-

ble us to achieve further national and inter-

national expansion. This is important for the

further development of our business.”

Jaap van Barneveld, Managing Partner of

Newion, said: “We consider our investment

in Reasult to be a valuable addition to our

portfolio. Reasult has built up an impres-

sive portfolio of clients in recent years.

The increasing reporting obligations which

confront housing corporations and real es-

tate investors are resulting in increased de-

mand for professional real estate software.

This trend and the opportunities abroad

mean that we expect Reasult with its high

quality products to be able to achieve

further substantial growth over the coming

years.”

Our team

Greetje van Ek

Investment Manager

Anna Tuinenburg

Office Manager

Jochem de Graaf

Investment Manager

Mathijs de Wit

Business Analyst

Nienke Verlaan

Office Manager

Understanding trends and shifts in IT mar-

kets requires more than anecdotal evi-

dence. Well-designed, focused and execu-

ted telephone surveys are a prime vehicle

to get an idea about what’s going on in a

specific market. Newion asked, Dr. Thomas

Mendel, Research In Action to compare

his EMEA IT Budget survey results for the

years 2012 and 2013, with more than 200 IT

decision makers interviewed for each sur-

vey. What are the key findings?

As far as overall IT budget trends are con-

cerned, investments in cloud Infrastructure

(public, hybrid, and private) are still num-

ber one, followed by business intelligence,

big data and in-memory computing. Third

place goes to flexible re-negotiation of

outsourcing contracts, in light of the cloud

phenomenon. The topic of SAP consolida-

tion is new on the agenda for 2013 and al-

ready achieved fourth place – something to

watch for 2014.

For the topic of cloud computing, enter-

prises are continuing to implement pri-

vate clouds, followed by public and hy-

brid clouds. In fourth place we find cloud

services for testing and backup which has

been quickly gaining importance over the

last two years and is likely to become even

more important in 2014. In the cloud space,

SAP is also new for 2013 in fifth place.

Survey backgroundEvery year, IT executives and vendors alike

are struggling with the right way of distri-

buting their scarce resources. Budgets and

internal manpower on the internal IT side,

versus marketing, sales and pre-sales labor

on the vendor side. One of the important

inputs for these kinds of decisions are ti-

mely and targeted surveys that explore the

real buying trends of enterprise IT decision

makers. That’s why, in 2011, Research In

Action decided to field its’ own survey to

get a better grip on where the real invest-

ment opportunities lie. The Research In Ac-

tion EMEA IT Trends Survey, is a telephone

survey that was fielded to 211 IT decision

makers in European Enterprises in 2011 and

262 in 2012. Job titles included CIO, VP IT,

VP infrastructure, VP operations, IT mana-

ger, and IT operations manager. All com-

panies interviewed are large or very large

enterprises with a headcount of more than

250 and a turnover of more than €50 mil-

lion. The survey was conducted between

September and October 2011 and again

between September and October 2013.

One important aspect of a successful sur-

vey (as well as for a successful venture

investment strategy for that matter), is a

clearly defined focus. The focus of this sur-

vey is the enterprise market (not SMBs)

and it is Europe (not the whole world).

Why? Because enterprise buying decision

and buying trends in these countries have

been traditionally relatively similar and the

SMB market is still very different from the

enterprise market. It will be therefore easy

for vendors and enterprises alike to put

conclusions from the survey results into

practice. It is also important to note that

we decided to use a top box approach, very

common in customer satisfaction surveys,

which means, we only asked folks for the

number one most important investment

trend. Why? Because it is a known rule of

thumb, that in most enterprises, only the

most important projects actually get fun-

ded and implemented, so asking for a wish

list will only dilute results unnecessarily.

Survey results: IT budgetNow, let us take a look at the actual survey

results. What are the differences between

2012 and 2013 when it comes to overall IT

Budget spending trends (See Figure 1)?

portfolio overview

3

EMEA enterprise IT budget and cloud computing survey results 2012 and 2013 compared

portfolio overview

4

Cloud Infrastructure (Public, Hybrid, Private

(incl. Virtualization))

With cloud infrastructure in first place for

both years, the proof is there that cloud

computing has most definitely arrived in

enterprise. No more is there need for the

“is this really real?” kind of discussion. En-

terprise IT managers are putting their mo-

ney where their mouths are, and vendors

are busy offering new services every day.

And IT services today include a variety of

cloud options. Having said that, the actual

percentages more than halved between

2012 and 2013, which most likely means

that the big cloud wave will already be over

by 2014 as the number one investment pri-

ority.

Business Intelligence, Big Data and In-Me-

mory

To some, cloud computing is already old

news; managing big data and implemen-

ting in-memory systems are the new hot

thing. Our survey result second that opi-

nion. Enterprises seem to be buying into

the concept with 12 percent stating busi-

ness intelligence, big data and in-memory

computing as their number one investment

area for 2012 and 2013 respectively. This is

an interesting and unique case where the

desires of the business decision makers

(mainly faster reaction times) and the ones

of the IT departments (new cool in-memory

technology) conspire in a positive way. Of

course, vendors like SAP and IBM also play

a role by pushing the topic hard, spending

many marketing dollars to do so.

Flexible Re-Negotiating of Outsourcing

Contracts

In third place, we find outsourcing. Driven

by the overall promise of the cloud phe-

nomenon - to slash the cost of running IT

services, companies want more favorable

conditions on their outsourcing deals. For

both years, a stable nine percent of respon-

dents see this topic as their number one in-

vestment priority, so the heat is clearly on

for service providers to react.

SAP Consolidation

Special mention outside of the top three

goes to SAP. If you are running SAP, you

surely ask yourself the question, why is

SAP so incredibly expensive? Can’t I get

something similar from the cloud? Why is

there no cheaper cloud-based SAP? For the

Figure 1: What is your number one investment area in IT for next year?

For 2012: N = 211 IT decision makers in European enterprises; for 2013: N = 262 IT decision makers in European enterprises.

portfolio overview

5

time being, and new on the agenda in 2013,

10 percent of companies told us they were

investing in the traditional way of trying to

contain SAP costs—through consolidation.

This approach is prudent because many

of the cloud-based SAP options are still

in infancy, let’s see how things change for

2014. And also keep in mind that SAP today

is much more than just ERP. Apart from a

comprehensive suite of business applicati-

ons, the company is offering a host of solu-

tions in other areas like business intelligen-

ce, in-memory (HANA = High Performance

Analytic Appliance), cloud and mobile.

Cloud Application Migration and Business

Apps in the Cloud

Fifth place goes to either moving or esta-

blishing business apps in the cloud with 10

and six percent for 2012 and 2013 respec-

tively. Anecdotal evidence from the inter-

views suggest that this desire is primarily

driven by the need to secure investments

made over a long period of time.

Survey results: cloud computingLet us also review a second topic that is on

everyone’s mind – cloud computing. What

are the differences between 2012 and 2013

when it comes to investments in the cloud

(See Figure 2)?

Implementing Private Clouds

This was the winner in 2012, with a huge

margin, still going strong in 2013, but only

in second place with 18 percent. Give it

another year, by then everyone will have

their private cloud. Why are enterprise IT

departments investing in the implementa-

tion of private cloud environments any-

way? The key focus is on automation and

cost savings. For large enterprises using

virtualization technologies, private clouds

are seen as the prime means of establi-

shing competitive internal IT services.

Public and Hybrid Clouds

Public and hybrid clouds are in second pla-

ce. Also going down in 2013 compared to

2012 (13 and 19 percent respectively). Many

companies are obviously planning to take

advantage of public cloud opportunities.

Research In Action believes that this is pri-

marily driven by business users and media

that are forcing IT departments to react.

The Cloud for Testing and Backup

One of the clear signs that the cloud mar-

ket is maturing, is the proliferation of more

specific investment topics like cloud for

test and backup (climbing from 12 to 18

percent between 2012 and 2013). Compa-

nies report significant savings and fast re-

turn on investment with cloud test environ-

ments, and as any IT manager will explain,

backup continues to be a major headache.

If you’ve ever tried a full restore of your

business’s data and applications that span

multiple tapes located in several locations,

you know how difficult this is. IT decision-

makers see the cloud as a cheaper and bet-

ter alternative to traditional backup soluti-

ons (and even if they are not, at least they

have someone else to blame).

(Public) Cloud Security

At eight percent in 2012 and 13 percent in

2013, security returns as the number four

top priority. Many buyers we interviewed

see cloud security as an important topic,

but not as the most important one. Compa-

nies that are most concerned about cloud

security typically come from such verticals

as healthcare and chemicals, financial ser-

vices, and government.

SAP in the Cloud

Back from the void is SAP, at least as far

as the cloud is concerned. The decision to

elevate cloud-related topics into the board

has put SAP into the spotlight again. En-

terprises now take SAP’s cloud strategy

seriously and are starting to make signifi-

cant investments, with 10 percent of res-

pondents voting for SAP as their number

one investment area in cloud. In Germany

this topic was even named a close second

for 2013.

Author: Dr. Thomas Mendel Ph.D., Mana-

ging Director Research In Action GmbH

Research In Action GmbH is a leading inde-

pendent information and communications

technology research and consulting com-

pany. The company provides both forward-

looking as well as practical advice to enter-

prise as well as vendor clients.

© 2013, Research In Action GmbH repro-

duction prohibited.

Figure 2: What is your number one investment area in the Cloud space for next year?

For 2012: N = 211 IT decision makers in European enterprises; for 2013: N = 262 IT decision makers in European enterprises.

portfolio overview

Servoy Named Cool Vendor in PaaS 2012

by Gartner, Inc.

Servoy, the leading provider of Business Appli-

cation Platform technology and solutions, was

included in the ‘Cool Vendors in Platform as

a Service, 2012’ report published by Gartner,

Inc.

According to the Gartner report, Servoy is of

particular interest to Independent Software

Vendors (ISVs) who are under pressure to de-

liver their solution(s) on-premises, hosted and

as a service (SaaS) while supporting a growing

variety of mobile devices.

“We are delighted to be recognized by the

analyst community for the growing excite-

ment caused by our comprehensive business

application platform and the many unique

ways in which we continue to drive value for

our clients and their customers and users. We

consider our inclusion in the Cool Vendor re-

port by Gartner as a confirmation of our mis-

sion and our reinvigorated focus on the

achievement of our ISV ambitions.” said Jan

Aleman, CEO of Servoy.

Investment in Flinqer, the collaborative

cash management network

Flinqer, the collaborative cash management

network, announced the closing of a serie B

investment round by Newion Investments.

The investment will be used to accelerate

sales and market development.

Reinier Weerman, CEO of Flinqer: “Cash distri-

bution between companies can be done much

more efficiently and cost effectively. Flinqer

plays a key role in helping companies achieve

this. With the backing of Newion Investments,

Flinqer can now increase its marketing and

sales activities and introduce further solutions

that radically optimise cash distribution within

supply chains. Flinqer is already being success-

fully used, among others, by Dura Vermeer

and Plus Retail and their suppliers.”

Jaap van Barneveld, Partner at Newion Invest-

ments B.V.: “Improving efficiency in cash dis-

tribution is particularly interesting these days.

Many companies are looking into a more ef-

ficient use of working capital. Yet, they often

limit to better inventory management, rather

than liquidity. We have investigated multiple

opportunities and have decided to invest in

Flinqer. Like supply chain management op-

timizes flows of goods and reduces invento-

ries, Flinqer optimizes cash flows and reduces

debts. Since both suppliers and buyers bene-

fit from Flinqer, we anticipate considerable

growth of the Flinqer platform”.

2013

Software Improvement Group awards Le-

anApps Life 3 Stars!

The Software Improvement Group (SIG) re-

cently awarded LeanApps Life a 3 star rating

(on a scale of 5). SIG is an independent agency

that evaluates the technical quality of software.

“A SIG 3 star rating for such complex software

speaks highly of the technical stability and main-

tainability of the software. This is achieved by

the ‘continuous improvement policy’ adopted

by the LeanApps development organisation:

a philosophy that small incremental improve-

ments create a clear upward trend, which mo-

tivates employees to maintain and further en-

hance the quality of the software.” says Ron van

den Broek, Managing Director of LeanApps.

LeanApps is committed to the technical qua-

lity of its software and is engaged in conti-

nuous improvement initiatives. To ensure that

there is no divergence from quality standards,

LeanApps uploads its entire source code onto

the SIG platform on a weekly basis. SIG gene-

rates trend reports and advises LeanApps of

any inconsistencies, which enables LeanApps

to identify potential technical degradations and

deal with them proactively. That way, LeanApps

secures the quality of LeanApps Life for its cus-

tomers.

Collibra launches Data Governance Center

4.0 - a Data Steward focused platform

The launch of Collibra’s Data Governance Cen-

ter is a groundbreaking change in the data ma-

nagement space. Collibra’s Data Governance

Center is a web-based solution for business

and IT data stewards who work together to

control and manage data. As a workflow-

based data governance engine it supports

data management processes and decisions

involving the data steward organization.

Data Governance Center 4.0 consists of a

suite of three seamlessly integrated products:

‘Business Semantics Glossary’, ‘Reference

Data Accelerator’ and ‘Data Stewardship

Manager’. The suite supports key data gover-

Newion News Flash

2012

6

May

2

July

3

February

27

March

22

portfolio overview

nance and stewardship requirements such as

business glossary, data directory, reference

data management, policy management and

compliance, data quality issue management

and monitoring.

Data Governance Center 4.0 is installed and

commissioned in 10 days. This includes instal-

lation, training and configuration to match your

operational model. This guarantees a low TCO

and accelerated data maturity increase.

Vector Fabrics named Cool Vendor in Em-

bedded Software and Systems 2013 by

Gartner, Inc

Vector Fabrics has launched tools to help soft-

ware developers optimize and parallelize their

applications for multicore architectures quickly

and cost effectively.

Why Cool? Vector Fabrics’ Pareon offers an in-

cremental path to transform sequential code

into optimized parallel code that takes full ad-

vantage of the hardware. The unique feature

of Pareon is its ability to optimize any code

written in C/C++ for various multicore archi-

tectures.

This means Pareon can optimize code for

mobile devices, network processing and high-

performance computing and other systems

that use these architectures.

Newion CTO Agile Workshop

Our portfolio companies often express a

desire to meet other companies in the port-

folio with a view to sharing experiences. So

Newion organised a CTO workshop on 30 May

with the aim of increasing synergy between

its portfolio companies. The theme of the

workshop was agile software development.

Agile software development is a software

development method based on iterative and

incremental development, where require-

ments and solutions evolve through collabora-

tion between self-organizing, cross-functional

teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolu-

tionary development and delivery and encou-

rages rapid and flexible response to change.

The workshop was held in Hilversum under

the inspired leadership of Rini van Solingen

and Vikram Kapoor (Prowareness). After a

creative introduction, the 15 CTOs attending

the workshop were asked to rate themselves

based on the level of agile maturity of their

companies and to present the outcome to

their peers. This was the start of a lively discus-

sion encouraged by the invitation for everyone

to ‘open their kimonos’. The resulting list of

current inhibitors was discussed and possible

solutions were suggested by the attendees.

After a walking dinner, Rini van Solingen and

Vikram Kapoor presented the do’s and don’ts

of Scrum. Scrum is an iterative and incremen-

tal agile software development framework for

managing software development.

The workshop ended with drinks and positive

comments from the participants. The gene-

ral opinion expressed by the CTOs was that

there is a powerful community and that regular

meetings with peers would be helpful. So the

next workshop is already being considered.

Newion achieves successful exit with sale

of Mirror42 to ServiceNow

Newion Investments achieved a very success-

ful exit with the sale of its interest in Mirror42.

The company has been acquired by an inter-

national strategic buyer, the US-based Servi-

ceNow – The Enterprise IT Cloud Company.

Mirror42 specialises in business intelligence

software for IT management.

The company grew with support of Newion to

a leading vendor of cloud-based IT and busi-

ness intelligence solutions that provide users

with key performance indicator (KPI) driven

dashboards and scorecards.

Newion used its Private Plus Fund to invest in

the company in December 2007. Together with

founders Karel van der Poel and Arjen Pront, and

CEO Marcel Smit, we looked back on the deve-

lopment of the company from when it first star-

ted, the role played by Newion and the process

that resulted in the acquisition by ServiceNow.

Karel van der Poel: “When we first met in

2007 Newion insisted on monitoring our de-

velopments for three quarters before procee-

ding to invest. But once we proved that we

were capable of closing deals independently,

the process rapidly gathered momentum

and the investment went ahead as planned”.

The entire interview can be read in News on In-

vestments July 2013: http://www.newion-invest-

ments.com/news-on-investments-july-2013

Newion News Flash

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April

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May

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9

Businesspark Friesland West 27B

8466 SL Nijehaske

The Netherlands

Luchthavenweg 81, 138

5657 EA Eindhoven

The Netherlands

Telephone +31 (0)513 640 633

Fax +31 (0)513 640 871

E-mail info@newion-investments.com

Contact us

Questions? Call us:+31 513 640 633a new eye on investments

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