Dr. John Bates is the chief executive officer of SER Group. John is an experienced CEO, with over 25 years of industry experience and he has collaborated three times with SER’s majority owners, the Carlyle Group. John is also a non-executive director of Sage Group, a cloud accounting and financial management software company.

Before SER, John was CEO of Eggplant, a pioneer of AI-powered software test automation (acquired by Keysight Technologies), CEO of Plat.One, an IoT apps platform (acquired by SAP) and founder/president of Apama, a pioneer of streaming analytics (acquired by Software AG). He has also served as a C-level executive in several public software companies, including Software AG and Progress Software. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Cambridge University.