Stephen Kelly

Length of tenure

Appointed 25 July 2023

Skills and experience

Stephen Kelly is a successful serial growth CEO with global experience in complex enterprise software & technology businesses with strong partner and direct sales channels. Stephen has an exceptional leadership record from start-ups to the largest organizations in both private and public sectors. Stephen led the turnarounds as CEO of Sage (FTSE50), Micro Focus (FTSE250), and grew Chordiant rapidly (Nasdaq) adding approximately $10bn of market value increase over almost 50 quarters during his stewardship as a public company CEO. The companies led by Stephen all became global market leaders in their sectors. In the 1980s, Stephen joined an early-stage European team at Oracle where annual triple-digit revenue growth was the standard in the enterprise data business. Stephen was on the founding team at high growth Chordiant, which grew from zero to $70 million revenues in 4 years, became a fintech market leader with 12 of the top 20 global retail banks standardizing on the Chordiant enterprise platform and listed in a $2 billion IPO on Nasdaq in 2000. Stephen led the rapid and successful transformations to profitable growth at both Micro Focus and Sage while enhancing customer advocacy & market leadership. Micro Focus tripled its revenues to over half a billion dollars in 3 years with EBITDA moving from 20% to 43% and was the top performing FTSE stock with 7-fold stock increase in 4 years. Sage cloud revenues went from near-zero to over $500 million ARR in 3 years and stock price doubled for Sage to become one of the UK’s few tech companies valued at over $10 billion.