Based in Grand-Rosière (Walloon Brabant), Odoo is definitely on a roll. With 2,000 employees and 7 million users, "Odoo is one of the world's most popular business management software packages," according to EY (formerly Ernst & Young). The financial, audit and consulting firm has just awarded it the 2021 Company of the Year award. The trophy was presented to its CEO and founder, Fabien Pinckaers, by Prime Minister Alexander de Croo. The icing on the cake for the Walloon entrepreneur already elected Manager of the Year in 2020.
The Company of the Year is the most prestigious award for a Belgian company. Odoo thus succeeds I-care, another Walloon company, active now in artificial intelligence applied to industrial predictive maintenance, as the winner in 2020.
This title exclusively rewards the elite among companies. The independent jury of specialists evaluates the following criteria: entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, strategic thinking, competitive spirit, openness to the world and finally management in the broadest sense.
"Receiving the Company of the Year award is the icing on the cake. Seeing Odoo maintain an annual growth of more than 50%, recruiting one person per business day, and watching the ecosystem grow internationally, is impressive in itself. Odoo helps thousands of SMEs and creates tens of thousands of jobs. We bring an unparalleled value proposition adapted to SMEs," says Fabien Pinckaers, head of the company. “The software is easy to use, ergonomic, complete and affordable! To this was added the community model and a network of 3,500 partners worldwide, which favours the development of the brand internationally.”
Odoo, which has offices in Louvain-la-Neuve and 12 others around the world, is a business management software company. Its open source model has enabled it to build the largest ecosystem of fully integrated business applications in the world, covering all business needs (accounting, inventory, manufacturing, project management, HR, etc.). An integrated solution which remains simple and intuitive. This is undoubtedly the reason for such a success.
"It hasn't been easy, we've fought hard to get this far, but it's nothing compared to what's coming. You know that in IT there are giants like Google, Apple and Facebook. But in Europe, there is only one major player, and that is SAP. We may well be in 2nd place, one day in the future, maybe in 10 or 20 years," added the ambitious Odoo boss. "It's not going to be easy, but we really do have the ability to transform the world of SMBs and large enterprises, on a large scale."