Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I want to hear your perspective on what I’m thinking. One trend that I am picking up on the market is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). We have a lot of SaaS companies. Some of them are starting to build a platform as a service. They are opening up their platform to integrations and APIs to build applications on top of and creating an ecosystem. Is this part of your strategy? Are you doing a Platform-as-a-Service strategy?

In that context of open problems that you are hinting at, there is a lot of domain knowledge out there on specific sectors and specific types of businesses that could be brought in. Your technology could be enhanced by extending and expanding with that domain knowledge and building a solution layer on top of what you already built as the horizontal layer.

What are your thoughts? Is this something that you are doing?

Florian Winterstein: Either you are extremely well versed in data or we are in the exact strategic point on how industries are progressing. Jedox is exactly out of that space of FP&A platform providers. We provide a platform; it has a broad range of capabilities with open interfaces you can build apps upon. We’ve developed around 40 apps for standard use cases. It could be HR planning, cost planning, TNL planning, and so on. It’s standardized and not industry-specific.

We have an ecosystem of more than 200 partners that are not only implementing our standard solutions but also using the open platform to build their solutions and apps. That could be an enhancement of our standards.

I like your question, because if you go to marketplace.jedox.com, we have a marketplace there. You will find our apps as well as partners’ apps. We allow our ecosystem to sell to our contacts and to build a business model using our contacts.

Everyone is heavily invited to join our approach and to build apps on top of us. It’s completely open and documented. We provide the marketplace to commercialize it. We don’t ask for a share. It’s really an open space. We exactly do what you mentioned in your last point because that’s a challenge in the same way.

We are super modern in terms of cloud computing and FP&A, but we are listening to the main expertise and a lot of use cases and industries. This is how we contribute. This is the ecosystem of Jedox.

You will not find another vendor in the FP&A space with an ecosystem like ours. More than 50% of our bookings are from that ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: These 200 partners that you talk about, are these small companies or large system integrators? What do you see there? 

Florian Winterstein: It’s a wider spread. There are five companies that are experts in a dedicated space, but most of them are mid-sized with 50 to 300 people. They usually offer a complete suite of finance or enterprise solutions, and we are the reliable offering of FP&A within their portfolio.

There are also some strategic ones. We have strategic partnerships with KPMG, PWC, and Deloitte. EY has built a solution for investment companies to manage and to plan their portfolios across their investments based on our platform. There are also large ones. The biggest are there as well.

This is where we continue growing. That’s the key driver of my growth strategy – that Jedox can scale through that ecosystem using business partner leverage.

Sramana Mitra: You may want to check out my writing on PaaS. I’ve written extensively about it for the last year which is why I’m on top of this trend. There are good PaaS companies that are hitting good numbers – $100 million to $1 billion ARR.

There is a whole cohort that is getting close to $1 billion ARR. Salesforce has knocked the ball out of the park completely. I think the ones that go to that level are the ones that are going to PaaS successfully and not just SaaS.

Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Florian Winterstein, CEO of Jedox
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