Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: My next question is double-clicking down to your FP&A use cases. You started off talking about data lakes and leveraging data more aggressively. Could you talk about the technology infrastructure that you are working with?

What ERP systems are you drawing from or interfacing with? What does the integration layer look like? Are you using the integration layer technology like the Snaplogic or the Neilsoft? How are you architected?

Florian Winterstein: The short answer to the infrastructure and architecture is that we provide a whole stack. We don’t rely on third-party products. Clearly, we have some open source components in our stack, but especially for ETL, we have our own layout that we developed ourselves. This provides us a significant advantage in terms of deploying our solutions. The time-to-value is shorter compared to the competition because in most cases, the connection of a data source is one of the key time drivers within the implementation.

We also own the fastest OLAP in-memory databases. That is also a differentiation in terms of being able to quickly aggregate and splash massive data which is what we need for this specific FP&A or forecasting budget planning use cases.

In terms of connection and partnership, let me start from where we came from to explain what our DNA is. It’s open-sourced. You will find a lot of Jedox information on our knowledge base on the internet. We are not shy in having an open door in terms of what our functionality and capabilities are. This is our heritage.

In terms of interfaces and data sources, it’s the same. Our ETA layout is widely open. We have 20 connectors to the most well-known brands of systems – a couple of ERT systems, SAT, and Oracle. We also have a strategic partnership with Microsoft.

We are one of the few NetApp and Axle integrator partners for development. To my knowledge, there are only three partners that Microsoft has on that level. That is one of our key strategic partnerships.

Open source reflects an open ecosystem. Our go-to market is also the same. We have an ecosystem of 200 partners. A lot of them are integrators who are coping with data and making the most out of it. In terms of AI, they bring something to the table that wasn’t there. That’s the core of our conviction and strategy.

Sramana Mitra: You are immersed in 2500 different accounts. You understand their problems. You know their use cases and you know the open problems. Do you see open problems out there that you are not going to be working on but you could encourage entrepreneurs to look into addressing?

Florian Winterstein: I would be interested in your perspective as you’ve been around for so long. I think what has changed significantly in the last decade is that technology was the limiter. It was about computing power, integration, and technical capabilities, and so on. I think that this has turned in a different direction.

Right now, companies and people struggle to keep up with technology. It provides more capabilities than what is actually used. Companies are running behind. In catching up, one piece of advice that I would give is to not follow each and every step but to jump over some of them and get to the newest capability.

If this sounds nebulous, let me explain. Earlier, the focus was still around efficiency to achieve the same results with less resources, there’s nothing wrong with that. What has dramatically changed is that technology has become available to bring results to the table that have never been there before.

This is my advice to entrepreneurs. Reach out for effective solutions. If I would build a company today, it would be less about efficiency but more about effectiveness. Bring something to the table that was not there like AI.

Make a difference for the customer. Not just doing the same with less resources, but to make a difference by providing something more effective. In doing so, you are helping the customer elevate themselves within their market into a position of advantage.

That means that you become the business partner and that you are at the center of value creation. It also means that you can ask a lot of money for the value that you are bringing to the table. It’s all around the business partner type of mindset. It’s around leveraging technology where it is up to date from a capability perspective. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox
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