Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG (Part 2)

Sanjay Brahmawar: The second is the operational model. You would be familiar with this. A lot of software companies have been dealing with the old model of perpetual license selling. We decided, as part of our strategy, to move and shift to the SaaS model. This is a major shift for the company. It involves a lot of change in the way we are working and the way that we bundle our products.

It also means changing incentives and behavior in your salesforce. It involves how you recognize your revenue because you have more deferred revenues, and you actually get more recurring revenues. Therefore, you improve the predictability and the performance of the company. It takes time to shift to this model. We are making that shift and we are two years down the journey. It’s moving well and fast.

The third part of our strategy is about the team. That is mainly around partnerships. We have invested in opening up partnerships with Microsoft, Adobe, Dell, AWS, and Google. We try to treat the hyperscalers as partners rather than competitors. That is helping us grow in scale. The most critical and underlying factor is an investment in cultural transformation. In the end, software businesses are about people.

If you want to be successful in this transformation journey, it is essential to bring in new growing talent within the company and address some of the cultural aspects that have been holding us back. It is a tough thing to do, but we are making progress in this cultural transformation.

I hope that gives an idea about a bit about my background but also why I am excited about being here at Software AG. We can talk about the progress that we have done in the last two years, but I wanted to give you that as context.

Sramana Mitra: What is the product? You talked about IoT platforms. Double-click down on what your positioning is. What does the landscape around you look like? Who are you competing with? You came from IBM’s Watson. Is that a competitor? Where does Software AG’s IoT platform sit in the competitive landscape?

Sanjay Brahmawar: We have our IoT platform called Cumulocity. It is fully integrated with our hybrid integration and API management platform. When we offer capabilities to a customer, we offer this end to end. Why is that relevant? It’s relevant because we collect, connect, configure, and update over the air with the help of Cumulocity. It involves a lot of remote devices and assets whether they are located in manufacturing units or they are on the move.

When you collect the data and bring it onto your IoT platform, you need to have that full connectivity with the balance of your landscape. If organizations want to translate that into better decision-making and service to their customers or feed that into their products, asset management, or into their maintenance management systems, they need to have that full connectivity. This is how we provide it through IoT and hybridity bridge. That is in terms of what we offer as a Platform-as-a-Service. 

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