Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox (Part 1)

Jedox is doing an excellent PaaS play in Financial Planning and Analysis (xP&A).

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Jedox.

Florian Winterstein: I’m 48 years old. My home base is in Munich. I lived in Switzerland for a while as well as a couple of years in the US and Singapore. I see myself as a global citizen.

There are a lot of trends in the software space that I have been in for 20 years. I originally started with strategy consulting. I’m still super thrilled and excited with the leverage that IT and cloud computing provides for me to work and create value in this field. I’m very thankful that in my career, life digitalization came with an impact that was never before felt.

In terms of Jedox, we are a cloud computing specialist for FP&A. We help companies plan costing and budgeting. We help these companies from a process and collaboration perspective and also from a data and digitalization perspective. It involves memory computing and some very advanced technology aspects. We do that across companies of different sizes, industries, businesses, and geographies.

We are dedicated to supporting different levels of maturity – from very simple electrification to very advanced cloud computing with a sophisticated AI base, business forecast, and big data inside. What I want to emphasize is our customer and user focus.

We are convinced that we are not going to change the paradigm of the user. In asking super large IT projects, we want to pick up the user where they are within their work. We want to help in day-to-day work to make people’s lives easier. 

Sramana Mitra: This is a space that we cover quite a bit. There are two companies that we have covered extensively. One is Anaplan and the other is Adaptive Insights. What is your position? Are they competitors? What does the ecosystem look like from your point of view? 

Florian Winterstein: You are pointing to two out of the 15 companies in th core FP&A space that Jedox belongs to. Anaplan clearly belongs to that space. Both of the companies have a different shape and profile.

I would say that we are similar to Anaplan. I think our technical capabilities are more extensive. Anaplan is more US-focused. They are really large as well.

Adaptive is a bit different. They have chosen the way into an ERP system. From a solution approach, they are more rigid and not as flexible as a Jedox solution would look like. We might be a bit more flexible, especially when it comes to modern topics like FP&A and unified and cross-enterprise planning.

Adaptive has a more predefined solution model for very specific use cases. It’s a different approach in how you implement solutions and how you bring value to the customer.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers are you working with? Is it mostly European customers and large enterprises?

Florian Winterstein: We have 1,700 customers globally. We are working with universities and charity organizations on top of that. It brings our total to 2,500 customers. Size-wise, they are mid-market.

In terms of turnover, I would say it’s $250 million to $300 million and up to $80 billion to $100 billion. We have very large customers like ABB or Microsoft where we do global planning for licenses or sales. That said, we are not limited in terms of enterprise versus mid-market business, but there is a history.

Jedox was founded in Germany out of an open-source approach. That is what differentiates us from our market. We have a technical conviction. The geeks in my R&D department are still around. That also provides a technical advantage on several aspects.

At the same time, I always say that the dollars that we are spending on our R&D is the same amount that Anaplan spends on their marketing. Our challenge is to grow and to keep up with these prosperous North American markets. That is why I joined Jedox with my global experience – to elevate the company to the next level in terms of size and cloud computing. We did great.

Our North American and Asian presence is keeping up. Right now, we are a company with a third consisting of Americans, a third from the German-speaking area, and the rest from the Middle East and Asia. We are more globally distributed and not so strongly focused on North America.

Industry-wise, we are pretty open, but with regards to history, manufacturing and complex service industries is where we find our home. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox
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