Enterprise Times spoke to Rick Berger at Dreamforce 24. Berger is the CEO of Rootstock, a cloud-based manufacturing-specific ERP built on the Salesforce platform. Berger joined Rootstock in April, and while I spoke to him in June, the opportunity to catch up a few months into the role was too good an opportunity to miss.
Since he joined, Berger has been rebuilding the leadership team to help grow the company. In August he brought on board Andy Brabender as Chief Revenue Officer, and in September, Johnathan Skelding joined as SVP of Global Alliances.
Rootstock has nearly 200 customers and around 150 employees, and in the next year, Berger sees the focus as growing the partner ecosystem. He intends that growth to be worldwide, not just in North America.
Berger has ambitions for growth and wants to maintain its position as the best cloud-manufacturing ERP solution on the Salesforce platform. According to Berger, differentiation will be based on delivering a “wonderful customer experience.” He added, “We’re focusing a lot of energy and time on making sure that the experience our customers have is fantastic, something that they could be really proud of and recommend us for.”
Berger believes that Rootstock has to earn the right for customers to have a wonderful experience every day. Many customers will be happy to hear this viewpoint. Historically, ERP vendors often deliver and forget. Rootstock, born in the cloud and with Berger at the helm, understands that customers must be engaged continually.
As to the longer-term vision, Berger commented, “I want to be the dominant player for mid-market manufacturing, ERP, where it’s significantly greater than just 200 customers.”
2024 is a year of growth and preparing for more
While the year is not yet over, Berger sees Rootstock growing at an accelerated rate. Beyond the hires mentioned above, the company is also hiring one level below the executive level. Rootstock is also adding new customers, not just in North America but also in Europe. Greenery recently selected Rootstock and Salesforce, with professional services from Balanced Force, an SI partner based in the Netherlands.
While historically, Rootstock has used its own professional services teams for deploying solutions, Berger aims to add partners that are capable of deploying Rootstock to help scale the growth faster. He explained, “We’re always going to have a services team. That’s not going to go away. We want to have a healthy services team. We also want to invest in having a healthy partner ecosystem. Partners bring efficiency, they bring innovation, they bring leads to us.”
With 2025 rapidly approaching, I asked Berger what he hopes to achieve by the end of next year. He answered that he hopes to continue the sustained growth but wants to pivot where the partner ecosystem supports more of that growth.
There are also a range of planned product enhancements. Berger said, “You’ll see innovation in the platform around AI. There’s a heightened investment into our financials package, and there are some things that our customers have been asking for that we’re going to prioritize sooner.”
On Agentforce
Rootstock has already built AI into its platform and is seeing customers adopt it. Berger shared that the company will embed more AI into its platform, notably around inventory. He also sees generative AI as helping offer customers better decision-making capabilities.
Dreamforce was all about Agentforce, the new Salesforce Agentic AI solution. On Agentforce, Berger said, “Salesforce has talked to us about Agentforce being part of a pilot program. It’s early in its adoption with its partners.”
On the wider implications of Agentic AI within society, Berger believes that it will “make people more productive at their jobs. I don’t see it replacing jobs.”
He did acknowledge that it might see organisations hiring less. From the Rootstock perspective, that makes sense. In Manufacturing, text-based generative AI solutions are less likely to replace manual shop floor roles.
Berger concluded, “I guess we’d be naive to think it doesn’t change the workforce for sure, but I hope that it makes people more productive, so they can be better at what they do, but time will tell.”
The Book Question
What was the latest book you read?
“Not for political reasons, I read Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance (Amazon Aus, UK, US). I thought it’d be interesting to read it.
“I also read, ‘The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind’, (by William Kamkwamba – Amazon Aus, UK, US) which is really good, it’s about a boy in Africa and based on a true story. He was able to create windmills that generate electricity to supplement energy in small villages in Africa. It’s a really great book. I read it mainly because my children were reading it for school.
“Before that, I read Learned Optimism, which is another good one (by Martin E. P. Seligman – Amazon Aus, UK, US).”
Was there any takeout for business from them?
“It was just an interesting take on growing up in middle America, (in the) Appalachians and the impact that that had on his road to where he is today, but nothing significant. I mean, it was an interesting book. There was more from Learned Optimism which was more of a mindset shift.”
