Transformation Every Day
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?
00:43:18 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:43:18] S0: I think it completely changed. First of all, if we're talking a year ago and now, a year ago when we started pitching and telling them that this is the future, it was really hard to convince anyone that this is actually going to work. You didn't really have something existing in the market for a problem like that. I was like, but before it worked, it's not, it's not, we're not okay to take on this risk to actually change how we go about transformation. We don't see a business case here, etcetera. And I think in one year that completely changed where you even hearsay there's so many players currently in the market, which for me is just beautiful to see because I experienced the market when there was nearly no player and you kind of had to explain the problem and the category first yourself to the actual listener. And I think a big, big difference I learned really early on and that then also kind of was the red thread through the hiring process, you can convince even C level and everyone if you're really knowledgeable about the topic. And that's why this thing with the book that, of course, is just illustrative, but I want people, and I think it's really important to have people in the team that understand the pain point really well, that can keep up the conversation that any sort of partner, any sort of c level, any sort of PMO project leader can really understand, okay, you know, they're maybe young, but they have the right drive and they bring the right energy, but much more important, they know what they're talking about. And I think if you can relate and you understand how this is working, you bring this knowledge with you what actually breaks during this transformation process, speak one language, you can easily build trust, and that really helps also in the selling process, and that helps in the end how the product was built, that they can find themselves in many of the terminologies within the product that they don't need to learn, there is an explorer, then there is a discovery, etc. Terminology saying that no, they find their scope items still where not every concept is completely being rethought from the beginning. But on the other side, they also really see that you kind of rethink every single concept from the ground up.