Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG (Part 1)

Software AG is redefining itself as an IoT PaaS company.

Sanjay talks about the transformation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start introducing our audience to yourself as well as Software AG. I know that the company has been around for a while but you are on a transformational journey. Let’s understand where you started and where you are going. 

Sanjay Brahmawar: Thank you very much. I was born in India. I am Belgian by nationality, but I lived and worked in India, Netherlands, Belgium, UK, Finland, and now in Germany. I joined Software AG in August 2018 and started serving as their CEO. Prior to that, I had been working in the industry for several years, 16 years of which was at IBM.

In my last role, I was leading Watson IoT for IBM. I was building that software unit for the company. I came across Software AG in 2018. I was excited about the heritage of this company. It’s a 50 –year old company. It has reinvented itself several times to be able to serve clients with great capabilities. They then moved to newer areas such as integration through acquisition, process management, and alphabet technologies.

They’ve lately stepped into the IoT space with Cumulocity to support customers on their digital transformation journey. Their portfolio excited me, but the company had not grown for the last 8 to 9 years. I am able to look at the company’s strengths and look at areas that hold the company back. We work with those areas to be able to take our company to sustainable profitable growth.

I traveled a lot and met hundreds of customers. From that, we derived our strategy. It is a five-year strategy to transform the company. We call it Helix. It is a continuous improvement journey. In these five years, we are repositioning the company on three main areas.

The first one is the focus. We want to help the company face the opportunities in the market in a way that we can bring value to customers. In that focus, we have declared the company as a hybrid integration API and IoT company. It is a company that supports our customers to become a truly connected enterprise.

The problem and the challenge that we see in the market today is that companies have data in many different areas and landscapes. This is a distributed architecture. There is a lot of new data being created through remote assets and IoT. The challenge is bringing the data together. We see that with hybrid integration API management, IoT, and Platform-as-a-Service, we can help our clients bring that data together on technologies like data lakes.

We then, through API management, give access to the business directly to be able to work and use data to make decisions. We make it more self-served rather than being dependent on data scientists and too much IT expertise. This is effectively democratizing what we would call hybrid integration API management and IoT.

North America accounts for 50% of our total addressable market. We have put a lot of investment into strengthening our operations there. The other geographies we are investing in are Germany, UK, France, China, and Japan. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG
1 2 3 4 5