Until 1990, Diebold was a U.S.-centric company with a few distributors in Canada, Mexico and Europe. But that all changed when we were presented with an opportunity to form a joint venture with IBM, which would allow us to enter many markets with an established self-service terminal customer base and excellent customer relationships.

I remember I was on vacation in New Zealand when I got a call in October 1990 from our then President Bob Barone asking if I would be interested in an international assignment. After some thought, I agreed, and my wife and I set off on a two-year assignment more than 18 years ago -- and we’ve never regretted the decision.

Initially, I was responsible for bridging the gap between the way Diebold operated in the United States and the many different ways of doing business in international markets. Originally, many people in headquarters thought that it would not take long to bring the Europeans around to our way of thinking. I was also jokingly told that I couldn’t come home until the job was done. But I think the opposite happened. Diebold has made lots of changes to meet the needs of international markets.

When we entered the international space, our product offering did not fit anywhere other than in some of the emerging markets where Diebold standard became the standard such as Russia, some eastern European countries and the Middle East. Other countries where ATMs had been installed for quite awhile adopted their own local and regional standards and requirements.

We spent an entire decade just trying to understand these requirements so our global engineering team could redesign our products to meet the needs of these other markets. In 2003, we launched the Opteva® hardware family of ATMs and Agilis® software platform. The result of these efforts moved Diebold several steps ahead of the competition and gave us an edge with a new standard product family. The flexibility of the new Opteva hardware allowed our customers to integrate new functionalities much easier and faster.

Today, we sell and service our products in more than 70 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and more than 50 percent of our revenue comes from outside North America. We would not have the global coverage we have today if we had not made this bold move in 1990.

Being a key participant in Diebold’s global expansion during the last 18 years has been very rewarding and I would not trade my experience for any other opportunity.

For me, it is very gratifying to look back at where we’ve come from and look forward to where we’re headed. There are not many companies that have celebrated 150 years of continuous operation. To do this, a company has to change with the times and take advantage of new technologies. There’s no doubt that Diebold has made many transition decisions throughout the years, and to survive, most of them had to be the right ones. We have great relationships with customers, and if we continue to build on those basics, the company will have no trouble lasting another 150 years.