by Catherine Woods - Thursday, 26th June 2008 -

Paul Taylor, the finance director of Aveva Group and the Real FD/CBI FDs’ FD of the Year, is a bona fide IT nerd. “I think I’d always felt that I’d like to end up in an IT or a burgeoning tech company,” he says.

Fortunately for Taylor, he’s ended up in a very good IT company. FTSE 250-listed Aveva recently announced another lot of strong full-year results, analysts welcoming news revenue is up 34 per cent to £127.6m while profit before tax has increased 83 per cent to £45.0m.

IT has been a focus for Taylor since the early days when he was in practice. “If you had one or two clients who were IT related, you were regarded as an expert,” he quips.

After tiring of life in the firms, Taylor moved to Philips Telecommunications before joining Aveva, a supplier of software and IT solutions to the engineering community, in 1989. Taylor explains the solutions Aveva peddles are predominantly used in the design-and-build phase of large oil and gas, power station and marine projects.

“IT is a dynamic business. New technology is changing the way we work and behaving, and the benefit to come from that is still very interesting – even if it’s much more common that it was twenty years ago,” he says.

Taylor was involved in Aveva’s flotation and has been instrumental in developing the company’s overseas subsidiaries. He was appointed finance director and company secretary on 1 March 2001 and is now in charge of a mixed finance and legal function that’s spread across 23 countries.

The international element is something Taylor enjoys most about his role. “There’s a lot of global interaction," he says. "One morning I could be talking to someone in China, then India, then America, and then back to China. You’re dealing with many people and many different languages.”

Asia is an area of great importance to the company; Taylor says 45 per cent of its business is related to the Asian community. “It will be interesting to see how much they’re affected by the US and UK economic downturns,” he notes.

For now, the credit crunch hasn’t had too much of an impact on Aveva’s operations. “Large capital projects are still being funded but then the commodity prices and requirements and demands for power and shipping remain at all-time highs,” he says. “It’s difficult to see any downturn in the medium or long-term.”

Taylor’s confident Aveva can meet the expectations of the market “and therefore I can continue to please people in respect to our results”. He adds: “I think we’re in a good position, organic growth is fairly well viewed in respect of the industries we serve, and we’re very strong.

“We obviously continue to look at new opportunities – it could be selling new products to the existing customer base – but we’re not looking to do anything drastically different. We’re not suddenly going to be offering financial software.”

This decorated FD is well aware of the expectations that people have now placed on him, too, in the wake of accolades and sparkling results. While he notes that the challenge is “always to keep going”, Taylor says managing those expectations is also crucial. “Awards are well received in respect of the company as they acknowledge the years of effort that have gone into the business," he says.

“Once you’ve achieved those awards, people have great expectations of you. Meeting those expectations is important but you must also keep those expectations sensible and realistic, based on the opportunities that are there and how you can deliver on them.”