Geert van Erven

Managing director Geert van Erven started his career after his administrative studies at the ABN-AMRO bank. He then moved on to start working as an administrator at a Waste Company and soon decided that automation was what he enjoyed most. He retrained and was taken in by his current partner and Technical Director Henk Eikelboom’s enthousiasm. This was in the late eighties. Geert van Erven started out as a junior programmer, but within the year he became one of the most important founders of the financial solution X-Finance and X-Logic, which was later taken over by UNIT4. He continued to create an automation solution in his attic for the disposal branch, which was implemented quite soon and sold to BFI (currently called SITA). Up to today, Geert’s solution is still a global market leader in the Waste and environmental branch. The company that sells his solution is one of the most important and biggest suppliers of environmental software. ‘Yes, my wife still thinks about how I used to fly out of my bed at 3.30 at night. My wife thought something was wrong with our daughter. But when she heard that I had thought of a name for the software solution I designed for the disposal branch, I had some explaining to do. Anyway, CLEAR<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><!--[endif]--> ¹ is still the most famous name in the environmental branch,’ states Geert van Erven.

The fact that OakSoft’s current R&D Manager Sohan Machielsen together with Geert van Erven was responsible for the software goes to show that OakSoft consists of a winning team. Now, almost 10 years later, Sohan is one of the driving forces behind OakSoft B.V. and he is responsible for the ‘tools’ underlying our application.

JUDICIAL SOFTWARE

After some time, Geert van Erven had the opportunity to start his own software firm. At the end of the nineties, the time has finally come. In a small room of 50 m² Geert runs his first software company. Even then his vision was specialization and, together with his brother, who was accountant of a medium sized law firm, he started developing a software solution for the law and judicial sector. Within years the company not only grew in number of employees, but the company also became one of the top three biggest suppliers of judicial software. ‘We are convinced that the personal relationships we build with our clients are the most important reason for our success. That’s why we are proud of the fact that, in all those years, we have never lost a client, which says a lot about the way we honor our agreements,’ says Geert van Erven.

PHOTOGRAPHER AND PRESS EMPLOYEE

Besides his career in automation, Geert van Erven has become one of few professional football photographers in the Netherlands. He covers football matches on a weekly basis for the newspapers and he is the official club photographer of the dutch football club Willem II.  Several years ago, Geert was even stadium speaker and he welcomed over 14,000 spectators from the center spot on a weekly basis. Several media published Geert’s photos regularly. If you would like to view Geert’s work, visit his website: voetbalfotografie.nl or have a look at his photos at Willem II's club site.

¹ CLEAR is a registered tradename of GMT Europe B.V.