CIS systems
John Baksa was appointed President of Hansen Technologies North America in January 2018. Previously, he was General Manager of Hansen’s Nirvanasoft and Solutions product lines and a key member of the Hansen Regional Executive team. Before that, he worked in deregulated energy and utilities operations and software development, most recently at Direct Energy Business, where he worked as Director of Billing Operations and Business Unit CIO.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Your company is very heavily invested in research and development. Tell me what you are trying to develop.
John Baksa: We believe it's important to continuously invest in our products and communicate our roadmaps to clients, so they have transparency about where we're going as a company. It gives us a chance to talk with our clients about their businesses and listen to their feedback.
We have a history of long-term relationships with clients and investing in products. We don't sunset products. If a client comes on board with us, their product is going to be here for as long as they want to use it.
In North America, we're very excited. We've bought several companies in the last few years, starting with Banner. Banner is a product that's been around for twenty-plus years.
I was a former user of Banner in one of my retail jobs. It's a proven platform, very stable and scalable. It's built on top of an Oracle relational database. It's very powerful.
However, the platform changed owners several times before we acquired it, causing product investment to drop off. When we bought the Banner product, we knew it had good structure underneath it. We had a great client base. It just needed some modernization.