Transformation Every Day
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.
00:45:40 · Louis Schmidlin, Alexander Greb
Sometimes we go too far and customers saying this is not how this works or this is a bit too far, we're not there yet, etc. But I think to find there the perfect balance builds up this trust and helps to then also stand a chance if you stand in front of people like this. [00:45:57] S2: Did did you already have experiences like, when you were too far or when you more or less out innovated, the person you were were talking with? Because, you know, we... We're still in the year of 2026 talking to to many organizations who are in their world on premise and in ECC and so on and have many voices around them who say, like, come on. The a s 400 we're running is is is just fine. Yeah. It's just fine. It works, yeah, in a certain way. Okay. It may give still answers which are correct, but the questions have changed. Yeah. Sure. There's a completely different game now. But but do you do you find these kinds of yourself in these kind of situations where you more or less are thinking and and and living already in a different decade than the the people you're talking to?
00:46:50 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:46:50] S0: Yeah, I think what was kind of our biggest of software, the market was just not there, where we really wanted to push agent on top of s four HANA process. And I think that was a big learning because we're like, don't customers see how well this agent could hear and maybe an automation and maybe a non SAP agent. And then we build this most efficient process where they often were telling us, hey, we're back to the basics, know, we're still on ECC and we struggle with complete different problems. And to make these the biggest pain points the ones where your most attention goes to. I think that is one side of the answer. Then on the other side, sometimes we build, or technical team build configuration agent that then go in a live S/4 system and start configuring where there may be an SAP sometimes says cool, but take one or two steps back before you kind of pierce some of our API policies and some of our thoughts where we are like, yeah. But if it if it can change something to the good, why shouldn't we do it? And where where we also need to understand that, you know, the the market needs to move with your solution. And
00:48:07 · Alexander Greb
[00:48:07] S2: the the... This You mentioned something I want to jump into because I want to hear your opinion about that. It's about the IP... API policy, which, when you talk with people in the business in the last months from different areas, the one who work for SAP, one who work, with SAP in a certain way that, are similar to your undertakings, they they struggle at times, yeah, with the API policy, which kind of APIs APIs they can use to to go into the system. And they say, like, okay. If we would have more possibilities there, we could be even faster in our in our, leap aheads that we are actually doing. What's what's your opinion about that? Do you experience similar, yeah, pulls, hand breaks in that way?
00:48:55 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:48:55] S0: Yeah, I definitely experience the same. It's just not always so clear, and everyone has a bit of a different interpretation, and we kind of wait on clearer instruction, and I think if there would be a bit more freedom on this, I think innovation could also move at a higher speed. On the other side, I also understand SAP in many topics where I think that was a conviction we had from the beginning where we worked quite closely with the people of Signavio in the beginning, where we worked quite closely with SAP. One of our backers is also Hasso Plattner Ventures, where they were like, you need to embrace and push the own solutions of SAP. And I think that was a conviction from the beginning, where we never want to work against the Signavio, where we never want to work against the LeanIX, where we never want to work against the Cloud ALM, but either just enhance their own capabilities and work with these tools together, because that's SAP strategy. And I think there you need to work with it. On the API policy, I would say, open it up and make it a bit more transparent on the kind of BTP strategy. Would say this is right, you know, you need to work with these toolings, and you need to help the customer using these tools in a much more efficient way, and that's why we're trying to work with them as close as possible and co innovate together. But, yeah, I think I experienced the same thing.