You came to SOFTIP at a time when it didn't even have its own website, which is now commonplace and we are living in the age of artificial intelligence. If you were to look back on those almost 30 years in the company, which innovations in your industry do you consider to be the most important?
If we go back in time, one of them is the aforementioned artificial intelligence. It has been with us for a few years now, but the advent of ChatGPT has brought it into widespread awareness. Another major breakthrough was the digitalisation of industry, processes, work, etc. I definitely have to put the cloud in the top five. We older ones also remember the advent of dot.net. But the turning point sometime in the very early days of massive IT diffusion was the arrival of PCs in companies as client workstations, the arrival of client-server architecture, and the revolution brought about by the three-tier architecture.
What about the advent of the internet?
The first time I connected to the internet illegally was in 1987. I managed to get in touch with the University of Munich and exchanged a few messages with a professor via a smart terminal using a telephone line. And from that point we got to where we are today in a relatively short time.
How do your colleagues react to this whenWhy don't you mention it to them?
I try to look rather forward. Telling young people what was decades ago in our extremely fast-changing industry is like telling a transport engineer about a steam locomotive.
Is it fair to say that the pace of innovation is accelerating?
It certainly does. The world is more globalised, knowledge, experience and news spread much faster.
How can one keep up with this pace from the position of a local, Slovak company?
Here I would oppose the word local. We have a division that is closely intertwined with Microsoft, and so our colleagues have a lot of vital information before the general world does. That was the case with artificial intelligence, by the way. Such a technological partnership then opens the way to the global market; we have a customer in Japan, for example, and we operate in dozens of other countries through various multinationals. So it is possible to succeed in the global market, but you have to have a strong partner.
Are you benefiting from this in Slovakia?
We have long been a leader in the ERP segment in our country and of course we take the opportunity to bring the best technology available on the market. But the ERP world is more conservative and there is no need for very fast and dynamic changes. Therefore, we often come up with new solutions not so much under the influence of trending innovations that jump out and become popular quickly, but rather based on what our customers tell us. A good example is the IoT Platform. IoT has been around for a few years now, but it took some time before there was a direct demand in our market for a solution built and leveraging this technology.
You started out as a company that specialized in the aforementioned ERP systems. Today the portfolio is much broader. When and why did you decide that you needed to diversify your offering?
The first diversification came in 2007, when we became an SAP BusinessOne partner. However, the most significant change in the company's strategy came after 2012. The ERP market was saturated, so we had to come up with additional products that made sense for customers. Currently, our strategy is to stand on more than one foot and not rely on just one type of customer. It paid off when the pandemic hit. Any such shock can threaten some market segments, but in others it can open up new opportunities.
Can we include the arrival of new, digital generations among the significant changes?
Of course. Young people are coming in and pushing us further. Overall, the users are changing, they are relying more on us as a supplier, they prefer to focus on their core business. The cloudification, which has spread massively just through the pandemic years, has contributed to this. This has not only led to technological changes in terms of how companies use software, but also to a change in customer behaviour. For example, before 2020, they required training to be done in person - lots of people in a room and one trainer giving a talk. Today that has completely disappeared, everything is done online. This was unthinkable 4 years ago.
We mentioned the cloud, today it is already a standard not only in the private, but also in the corporate sphere. So is on-premise heading for history?
It is not yet completely extinct in enterprise software. It may be moving in that direction, but there are still a great many companies that have an on-premise form of software ownership. Others have at least a private cloud or hybrid system.
And what about artificial intelligence, which is now used by perhaps all the leading players in the enterprise IT market, where do you see SOFTIP in this context?
Chatbots have brought about a big boom around a technology that has been around for a decade. Even the elevators in this building have artificial intelligence built into them. And of course it has a big future that we can't ignore. Because everybody is going to be using at least some sort of AI-enabled cloud service to address their needs - we're talking mainly about taking away the monotony of work, making analytics faster and so on. Several years ago, we already developed a solution using artificial intelligence for a specific customer, we delivered chatbots to support communication and so on. So we already have experience in this direction.
So what does your typical customer look like on the Slovak market?
We cannot talk about one dominant customer profile. For Microsoft solutions, these are corporations or state institutions with hundreds of users, but we also have a large number of small customers to whom we supply, for example, cloud licenses. Similarly, in the case of ERP, we have a significant position in manufacturing companies, multinationals, but in engineering, for example, we focus more on small and medium-sized companies.
Not so long ago, the trend was that many wanted a bespoke solution, today it seems as if the trend in communications for global technology players is turning in favour of standardised solutions. Does this also apply in our circumstances?
Yeah. Because when you tailor the functionalities of software to your exact specifications, they grow over the years to such a size that they become very difficult to maintain as a whole. Every intervention and change has to be rigorously tested so that it doesn't affect other functionalities, departments, processes. That is why we try to show the customer that there is another way to follow their ideas precisely and in detail. Sometimes it is better to compromise. I would compare it to the massive introduction of touch controls in cars. It was very modern and beautiful in design, but we are gradually discovering that it is much easier and better to adjust the temperature and intensity of the ventilation with a traditional dial. Not to mention the negative safety impact of flipping through extensive menus while driving. So we're seeing the return of analogue controls combined with digital displays.
Where will SOFTIP go in the next few years?
We are in the best years. And we're constantly changing, younger colleagues are coming in, our age average is dropping, they're bringing something new and they're able to push through with it. Which is a guarantee that SOFTIP has a future ahead of it. Because if we had a conservative view of the world around us, we wouldn't have a chance to survive. But after 33 years we are still operating successfully. And this is confirmation that we are a youthful company despite our age.