German software company, Software AG, was founded in the early days of the IT industry —1969 — but today is positioning itself as offering a solution to organisations facing today’s many challenges of ‘going digital’.
The company's flagship product now is its Digital Business Platform, essentially a methodology for a business that wants to undergo digital transformation, complemented with a range of software products to enable that process.
Software AG's COO for Asia Pacific and Japan, Stanimira Koleva, told Computerworld Australia that the company’s new strategy had been developed over the last couple of years and was aligned with the changes the company was seeing in IT and its view of what new digital companies should look like.
“Our traditional business started with Adabas [a relational database] and Natural [a natural language database query tool] and until about 2000 that was the main business of the company. Then we embarked on a number of acquisitions: WebMethods, Aris, Apama, Terracotta. Our newest is Alfabet.
“Over the last four years we have invested to make sure these platforms work together and to create that one suite of applications called the Digital Business Platform.
“In the past IT was driven by huge monolithic applications and a lot of organisations ended up with silos, and they got some lock-in and the speed and agility started suffering compared to some of the new entrants.”
Managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Gordon Gakovic, said Software AG had been in Australia for 25 years and today had 115 customers in the country, typically among the largest 10 percent of companies.
“Our sweet spot is more complex environments that are in need of end-to-end integration and automation to create real time capabilities.
“We are doing some really cool things across banks, telcos and retailers; things that customers don't want us to talk about because it is the technology that is driving their digital transformations and giving them competitive advantage.”
He said the company’s current strategy had evolved from simply being product focussed. “Historically we thought we had a better solution suite, but that was not enough and we spent a lot of time consulting with a lot of customers to understand how business operated. We automated that whole process and we developed a methodology and a business model, and that has been underwritten by the likes of Gartner.”
He claimed that the market was receptive to Software AG’s approach. “We think the time for software AG is now. Organisations are hungry to transform; They don't know what they have to do, they don’t know how to do it, and they don’t know why they are doing it and we have the answers.”