Transformation Every Day
00:35:40 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:35:40] S0: I think at the moment we're 24 people, all sitting here together in Berlin. And I think we had quite an interesting kind of hiring policies where either you're really technical and it goes a bit in the point where you said before, it's really these technical nerds, or you understand the SAP ecosystem or the transformation pain. And it was really important that when you speak to a customer, when you speak to an SAP partner, that you can relate on a level where you like, I know what's being talked about here. I think this is so essential in order how we build this product as kind of a delivery engine across the methodology. We make everyone read when they start the whole book of SAP Activate. It's four fifty pages. And it's not always the most pleasant surprise when you start at a young company and you think, okay, can I start? And then the management puts you a big SAP Activate book in front of you. But I believe that, of course, on the technical side, so much more is possible with kind of hiring these best engineers straight out of university that can achieve so much. And these right experts and these people that experienced this pain before and were like, we need to change something about this. We cannot just accept even though some of the partners do not agree what Christian Klein said, but there needs to be a change and let's work at the forefront of this change and I think that is really exciting and I think through that we could hire a lot of people directly out of the SAP ecosystem and etc. And actually start making quite an impact currently with our product.
00:37:30 · Alexander Greb
[00:37:30] S2: But talking about 24 people, I think this is still smaller than most IT departments that you find at your customers. So, basically, a customer also could say, like, okay, based on the progress that is possible in the technology, why shouldn't we build our own discovery platform? Why why should we why do we need somebody from the outside to do this? What's your opinion on that?
00:37:54 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:37:54] S0: I think the opportunity costs are just extremely high to build it yourself. If you already see what what these kind of developers are costing, and it's not the core of many of our customers day to day business of building great software. And I think also software building has completely changed to an AI native way of building it, and these AI native companies have a huge advantage there to just math much more efficiently and in a much quicker way to much better results. On the other side, I also believe that if now a big decision is about should we build it ourselves, we kind of need to change on delivery, I say it's you're probably going to be one year ahead and the speed at what is now possible is so high that you will always be slightly behind. And what I think enterprises, consultancy, SIs, BIs should do, their experts, maybe together with their own solution, needs to integrate in solution like ours. And together, we can really build something like a powerhouse and really aggressively move across the market. And I think through that they can kind of build in their own expertise, their process knowledge, everything they have around that, they can build addition on top of foundation like ours. And if this comes all together, you have a completely new chance in the market and you can really deliver value for the customer. And I think in the end, that's what it's all about. And we see it happening, and I wish everyone good luck to keep
00:39:28 · Alexander Greb, Louis Schmidlin
[00:39:28] S2: up with the speed of our development. And plus what you said beforehand, you bring the deciding mixture of... Yeah. Let's say, on the one hand, the technologists who want to make the cure, and you you have the SAP consultants who bring the suffering and the pain that is supposed to be cured. This kind of special mixture is not really often happening within IT departments. Yeah. [00:39:58] S0: Yeah. And I think we get a lot of or we get good people out of these consultancies out of directly SAP, were like, okay, let's move at the speed what is currently possible, and I think it's quite attractive. And in this really special mixture of combined with a lot of hard work, I think a lot of things can happen. And on the other side, we're really customer obsessed. We're trying to adapt the technology to their specific approach, make it part of their delivery, work with them together, learn from them, learn from customer, bring our own delivery team to the customer on-site, help them to set everything up, integrate so seamlessly in their already existing system, and through that also make this transition much more seamless, which in the end is really essential to make a product like ours work. [00:40:54] S2: How do the workshops look like that you're engaging at the moment? Is it that you are joining consultants in, let's say, DDAs and discovery workshops, in architecture workshops? Or are you also yourself proceeding with end customers in engagements?
00:40:54 · Alexander Greb, Louis Schmidlin
[00:40:54] S2: How do the workshops look like that you're engaging at the moment? Is it that you are joining consultants in, let's say, DDAs and discovery workshops, in architecture workshops? Or are you also yourself proceeding with end customers in engagements? [00:41:15] S0: I think it's like in the end, every customer has such a special setup, that some have a system integrator that works with yours with and you work with if there is a system integrator to deliver value together. Sometimes it's us with the system integrator going to the client. And some of the clients say, hey, look, we have so strong internal IT teams. We just need a software like ours to get this transparency to get up to speed. And for that, we can do a lot of things internally and then just bring some subject matter experts in. I think everything is possible and everything can have an impact in the end. I still believe that product and services in this kind of combination can create the most value, if these services are now coming from an external partner or coming from our own people of what I sometimes call reverse deployed engineers, which is a bit of a wordplay to the forward deployed no, I call it reverse deployed consultant, which is a wordplay to forward deployed engineers of Palantir, of actual consultants that understand what's going on and understand the technology and then help partners being onboarded much more efficiently, help enterprises accelerate their own transformation. I think in this kind of combination, you can achieve a lot of value together.
00:42:40 · Alexander Greb
[00:42:40] S2: How how difficult is it for a young company, yeah, like yours? And, like, example, you yourself are not something that I would consider old and gray haired or something like that. Yeah. But but when when you are coming... Okay. This is the typical entrepreneur gray hairs, which are coming earlier than than with other people. But what do you experience in your customer engagement? Are you... You're sitting across a Mercedes Benz CIO? Is it difficult for a young company with so young people in that kind of space to be taken seriously?