In the recent episode of ‘groCTO: Originals’, host Kovid Batra engages in an insightful conversation with Vladislav Maličević, CTO at Jedox. The central theme of the discussion revolves around “Inside Jedox: The Buy vs. Build Debate”.
The episode starts with Vladislav recounting his 20-year journey from being one of Jedox’s first developers to stepping into the role of CTO. Moving forward, He sheds light on the company's vision, the transformation from an open-source project to a full-fledged cloud platform, and the various hurdles and achievements along the way, such as competing with industry giants like IBM and SAP. He also points out that many early team members remain with the company to this day.
Vladislav then dives into important decisions surrounding whether to build in-house or outsource various parts of their product, explaining that spending constraints often guide these choices. He also emphasizes the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) and highlights the importance of integrating with Microsoft Excel as a key factor in their success.
Kovid Batra: Hi, everyone. This is Kovid, back with a new episode of groCTO. Today on our show, we have Vlado from Jedox. Welcome to the show. Great to have you here.
Vladislav Maličević: It's a pleasure to be here. Hi.
Kovid Batra: Hey, Vlado. All right. Like before, um, I start off with a beautiful discussion with you around the age-old 'Buy vs Build', I would love to know a little bit more about you, um, your hobbies, what you do at Jedox. So let's, let's start with a quick, cute intro about yourself.
Vladislav Maličević: Yeah. So, uh, my name is Vlado. The long name is Vladislav Maličević, uh, long name coming. It's a, it's a Serbian name and, uh, coming, coming originally from, from Bosnia, but I've been living and working here in Germany for the past 22 or 23 years. I started, uh, 20 years ago this year, uh, with Jedox. I was one of the first, uh, employees, one of the first developers and, uh, slash the, uh, employee of the company, went through the ranks over the years. I was lucky to follow the growth of the company and went through the ranks in the, in the engineering department. I was, the Head of, uh, Development and the Director of Development, VP, um, Development, uh, and later on added support, uh, um, coined the cloud team back in the day. And, um, a few years back, I joined the C-level as a CTO with the company of 450-500 people today. Right. And it was an incredible journey, um, to, to, to look at, uh, from, from within, uh, observe and participate in, in this, uh, in this long journey.
So, um, yeah, but more about personal. So I'm a, I'm a father of three girls. Um, I also have a sausage dog and, uh, yeah, with my wife, uh, we live, uh, with my, with our kids here in Karlsruhe in Germany, which is a university city, um, let's say, more, uh, in the southern part of Germany. Yeah. So that's, that's about it.
Kovid Batra: Cool. I think, uh, this is really amazing to see. I mean, rarely we see this someone spending such long time joining in as an employee and then growing to that C-level in a 20-25 year journey. So that, that has been, uh, one of my first experiences, actually, with someone on this show. I would love to know how it all started and what is Jedox about, uh, what was your vision and the whole company's goals and vision at that point of time? Now, 20, 20 years hence, how, how do things look like?
Vladislav Maličević: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, the only constant in life is change, right? And, and many things, uh, stay unplanned. Initially, I, I really didn't, didn't intend to, to stay with Jedox. I thought it was in-between, uh, just an in-between jobs kind of thing, and, um, also the setup, it was a very small company, small office, uh, just a few, few people, uh, which by the way, all of them are still with the company. So all the people that were in the company when I joined are still with the company, which is also one, one quality, I must say. Like I said, I initially didn't, didn't, didn't plan to stick too long, but the challenge was there and it, it, it became more and more interesting from day-to-day. And, um, we were kind of, it's, it's easy when you have a kind of a black, uh, blank canvas, yeah. There is no product and then you start from scratch and you start building something and you know, over time, it becomes, uh, you see more and more of a product and you, you see more and more customers and it's sticking with the, resonating well with the, with the, with this huge community. And then you also add ecosystem to the, to the mix, you have partners in between the customers, growing globally, opening new offices, adding more people and things like that. So it is, it is simply, um, it was, it was an incredible journey. Usually you start off, like you said, either you hop from one, one, one job to another every few years and change, or you join as a, as a founder, right? Uh, you could also be, uh, it's not, not unusual to have a founder on the team, uh, being early on there and then, you know, doing something with the company and moving on, right? I indeed, I wasn't the founder, but was one of the first early people. So I, I sticked with the, with the, with the product and with the company, and, this is, um, resonates well with my, uh, passion. I kind of map myself or I reflect a lot of my, my work life and life with the product that we built over the years.
What Jedox actually is, is, um, I mean, uh, we are proud, uh, leader in the magic quadrant, Gartner's magic quadrant for, for EPM, CPM, or enterprise performance management, corporate performance management, or XPNA, how they call it nowadays. Being in the upper right corner, it was obviously not, uh, not, it was a journey. It's not like we showed up immediately there, right? From, from zero to hero, right? It took us a few years to move slowly through the, through the, from the lower left to the, to the upper right corner. And certainly, you know, competing there with the, with others, with the big names like Oracle, like SAP, like Anaplan, um, it certainly make, makes us proud because we are by, by far a much smaller company, uh, by, by sheer size, and, um, to some extent also by history or by tenure, right? Um, but yeah, it shows that, um, you don't need a lot of people and a lot of money to build good products and, and make them stick with the, with the customer.
One of the things that helped us in the beginning, I mean, that, that's also, we evolved over time. Uh, one of the things that helped us in the beginning to put a foot in the door in the market is the fact that initially we were, um, actually we started as, as a freeware and then switched to open source, which is kinda, you know, 20 years ago, it was things like Linux started showing up around. I mean, actually it was, uh, uh, Linux was, was way before, but, but around that time, there was like a boom of open source. And we were, um, I belie, theve first product in the market to offer planning, uh, as open source, and that was a big shock in the market and it helped us a lot to, to, to spread the word, uh, globally and become known in the market, although we are, uh, we had the low or no, no marketing budget whatsoever. Right? Um, and then over the years we, we matured, we kind of, um, made a clear separation between, between open source and the commercial bit. And, and, uh, we curated both brands in parallel. But over time, we, we, we focus nowadays, we are focused totally on, on our cloud product under the name Jedox. And, um, basically open source is, is the past. It's also not something that we see in the market nowadays anymore in this, in this, uh, let's say in this bubble. It's relatively, you could say, it's a, it's a niche, but it's a quite, quite, uh, I wouldn't say lucrative, but quite, quite a big niche. It's a specific need. From the business to be able to quickly plan any kind of data, usually finance data, but any kind of numbers, being headcount, in any vertical, in any industry. Yeah. Nowadays, it's even, you see it in every, literally every company needs to do some kind of planning. And doing that with a tool like, like Jedox, makes it less error prone and, uh, very, very seamlessly integrated, allowing, um, to connect to, to the existing third-party systems, um, connecting all the data from all the different systems that you usually find, on average companies nowadays have 150 plus tools or services that they consume. Jedox is well-versed in, in accessing all these different existing products in the, in the customer's ecosystem and then combining those in, in Jedox.
In a nutshell, Jedox is, is a, is a platform. It's a local platform for building business applications, right, speaking less technically. But, what you have in that platform are components. There's a lot of IP, Jedox IP in there. You have your own in-memory database. You have your own ETL tool. You have your, your backend, middleware. You have, uh, frontend for, for mobile, for web, obviously, and we have quite a good integration with, uh, Office, in particular with Microsoft Excel, which is kind of a go-to application for any business user nowadays, right? Most of the time, the journey of our future customers starts somewhere in Excel, they did something over the years in Excel, and, um, they built it, they invested hours and hours in it and they've been living it, but, you know, they, over the years it, it became cumbersome to, to maintain it, multiple copies of it, multiple versions of it, uh, sharing it across the team or even teams, uh, error prone, and it's, it's, uh, known as an Excel chaos, which we actually try to, to solve. Right.
A lot of product, obviously, 20 years we weren't sitting, um, so we were quite busy developing that, but nowadays, it's quite extensive and mature, very grown up, uh, enterprise platform for building business applications, right? And coincidentally, majority of the, let's say, first, first-time users come from somewhere from the office of finance. Usually, that is the, that is the entry point where users come from. But, uh, it's not limited to, right, it's just the, usually the entry point, but we spread quite quickly within the organizations because they see the value of the product.
Kovid Batra: Got it. I think this is very, uh, interesting, competing in a landscape where you have MNCs and legacy players already there. You have been there from the very beginning, so the company founders and the company belief in that respect on day zero and today, uh, would be very different, right? At that time, you guys might not have even imagined where you would be 20 years hence. Of course, people have a vision there, but what was it like for the Jedox team and Jedox founders at that point of time?
Vladislav Maličević: Yeah, I mean, I mean the, the vision was there, but the, the vision, I could say that the, the vision was to, to, to rule the world or rule the bubble, rule the, rule, this, this, let's say, small niche, even back in the day. Appetite was certainly there, but we were also realistic. We knew that, you know, it, it will take a while to, um, even meet, uh, let alone exceed, the functionalities of the, of the established product in the market back in the day. Already, the market was there. It was booming. It was ruled by IBM. IBM was the absolute leader. A company called Infor was, was, uh, also quite prominent in the market back in the day. Actually, they weren't even called Infor back in the day, but through acquisitions, they, they grew into Infor, um, and they still exist, uh, to date. We knew we were on the, on the, let's say, on the, on the lower end and we weren't the disruptor, but one of the vehicles was, was definitely open source and coming through the open source, uh, on the one hand side, you have a, you have a behemoth, let's say, or a mature, um, established leader in the market selling, you know, I don't know, a couple thousand dollars per user, per seat, um, license. And then all of a sudden, this small team from Germany comes with a product that almost, almost, right, not, not really back in the day, but, but, um, almost matches the, the functionality, brings in, let's say, a subset of the functionality for no, no cost at all. It was open source and everybody was open also to contribute back in the day. There was no GitHub back in the day. We used to use SourceForge, sourceforge.net. That was, uh, that was the platform of choice back in the day where we hosted our code.
The word spread quite quickly and, um, the adoption, we saw traction very early. I think I joined in November, October-November 2004 and we had the first version of the product that you pretty much you can recognize even today and in today's products. So everything you need to know, everything you need to be able to work, you already had. Um, I believe we, we shipped in February of 2006. So it's a year and a half. It took us 18 months to put, uh, put the product together, and already there was, uh, in-memory database. We had a frontend for Excel. We also had, uh, let's say some primitive way of ingesting data, let's say, um, some, some baby version of, of ETL within the product. We had a predecessor to our, uh, today's web frontend. We had it, uh, it was, uh, Web 1.0, the old, old school, uh, web frontend that was already connected to, to, to this, um, to, to Excel and to the database. So we, we had web frontend. So we were ready to, to, to rock or ready to run.
Later on, additions came in, including ETL, including a modernized version of, uh, the web frontend. And nowadays, obviously, everything is happening in the web and you are doing, also authoring within the web and Web 2.0 was a thing back in the day. Like we quickly jumped on the boat. Later on, other innovations happened. Shift to Kubernetes, so, microservices and things like that. So going from the legacy, I mean, actually the, the first shift was the cloud cloud was the thing. There was no cloud back in the day, right? Maybe there was some hosting somewhere, but usually customers were running it on their own, even on their laptops or, um, within their corporate network, server, client server kind of thing. And then later, 2012-2013, we saw cloud kind of picking up and this is where we started our excursion into cloud. And from there, um, we moved on. Today, we are a cloud company, a SaaS product.
Kovid Batra: Yeah. So, in this, in this whole journey, I think you survived, in fact, you, you thrived as, as a product, as a, as, as a company, right? Of course, you mentioned that you became an open source product, right? So that, that was one critical move which probably helped you a lot in exceeding what your competitors or counterparts for doing, but there must have been much more deeper technical decisions, and with this question, I think I'm trying to understand from you how many times you had to take those critical calls which impacted the business in an immense way, and whether those were decisions where you were building products in-house or you were outsourcing it and how, how did that journey come along, now, 20 years hence, when you look in, in the, in the retrospective.
Vladislav Maličević: I mean, in retrospective, I wouldn't say there were too many critical events, right? The situation in the market is dynamic and you have to react on, literally on a daily basis. You have to make decisions on, uh, really, literally, some, some important decisions are made on a daily basis. However, the strategy, you don't change every, every two days. I would say, we had three, four waves, uh, over the course of 20 years where we were, for example, cloud decision to go all in on cloud. Um, it took us a while, right? Because we are, I'd say, uh, first of all, it's quite conservative, the market itself is quite conservative. You are usually working with financial data. Financial data is very critical. People are not eager to, to expose financial data out of their corporate network. So when the cloud showed up, it was kind of, oh, do we, do we, do we even jump onto this boat? And, and I remember, uh, vividly, so there were, there were like pros and cons, and, and there were voices in the company. I would say majority of the voices were, were, uh, against cloud. "Hey, nobody will jump on this boat." "Hey, nobody wants to put data in public cloud." "This will not fly." And indeed, it didn't, uh, it didn't, uh, didn't fly immediately, right? It took us a while and depending on the market, obviously here in Germany, it's quite, I would say a bit conservative market. So it takes a few years for, for things to become mainstream, and for the adoption, one thing was technically not nothing, I wouldn't say nothing special, but was a smart move by Microsoft back in the day when they introduced, uh, something, a thing called German cloud, um, which was kind of an idea to, to bring in sovereign German cloud on German soil, operated on German soil, but German company, right? Disconnected from the rest of the world, kind of from, from the corp in, in the US and things like that. This kind of brought more trust into it, of course, with additional marketing and massaging customers, um, across the German and Dach region, Austria, Switzerland, and the Germany region. But it definitely helped in adopting cloud more. And then a few, few years later, all of a sudden, it became, you know, cloud became commodity, somewhat delayed, but became commodity even in Germany. And then it was no brainer. Yeah, okay. Let's go. You don't have these conversations anymore or, or very rarely. Yeah.
That was one thing which was kind of critical back in the day. We started talking about 2011-2012, but the real push came around 2015-2016. So it took us a few years to come from zero to, to really, hey, full-steam ahead, let's, let's, let's do this, this cloud thing. That would be one thing, I think being close to, to, to Excel. So initially being open source helped promoting the brand. You would need to spend millions and millions globally on marketing to spread, spread the word about Jedox, um, normally, and with open source, it kind of went word of mouth and it very quickly spread. Um, again, context, right? We're not in the Google business, right? We're not a commodity that every consumer is using, but let's say, in our bubble, the word spread super-quickly. And, um, later I remember I spoke, we acquired one company, uh, in, in Australia, uh, back in the day and, and they became, before we acquired them, they run as a partner for a few years. And, um, I had a pleasure talking to, to one of the founders of that company, and he said that he remembers well when we announced the first initial version. He was back in the day using IBM and he read it on some forum that there is, um, there is a new product called Jedox and it's open source and it's free where you can download it and use it, and, and he does almost everything, um, that we used to pay for and he wrote to his colleagues, emails saying, "Germans are coming." And I use that reference often. It's quite quite interesting because hey, where's Australia from here, right? On the opposite side of the world, but it really, uh, the word spread quickly. So I think that was a good decision to go with open source initially. It didn't, on the other hand, it didn't create any traction. I must say, very little, almost no traction on the development community, right? We had it, we had it up, but we were the sole maintainers, very little input from the community, right? Maybe it's too technical, yeah? And again, maybe it's a context and a niche which we are in. It's not some commodity that everybody needs on their desktop. So maybe that's one thing.
So, open source, cloud, uh, being close to Excel was always, uh, I think was a good thing. Uh, Excel is the, I don't know. Um, there's this big question. Yeah. What is the most common functionality in every enterprise software? And that's actually 'export to Excel', right? In every enterprise software, you will find that button or option 'export to Excel', in every enterprise software. So, I don't know, there are billions of users of Excel, certainly hundreds of millions of Excel users globally, and, um, this is a kind of citizen developer. Uh, if you, if you, if you look at like from, from that aspect and us being close to that, let's say, both, both literally close. We, we are very compatible with Excel. We integrate well with Excel. We also understand well, uh, Excel format. We can ingest it and import and export it in Excel format. So literally that, but also the, this concept of spreadsheets, I think this was also a good, right choice.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, I think that most of the time it really helps, like instead of going out and introducing something completely new, which is not in the behavior of the user. It might be a hit, of course, like there are revolutionary ideas which are not a part of the behavior and then people form a behavior around it. But mostly, what I've seen is that any product team building a product closer to the existing behavior of people and the way they are using the current solutions, if you are close to it, then it is very easy for adoption, easy for people to understand and relate to, and they quickly start using. And then, of course, you can put them on a journey of gradual learning where you introduce new features, you put in more services and then they grow from there. But the initial hooks should be like that where you are close to the existing solution and yet offering something very impactful and having more data than what the current solution is giving them. So yeah, I think it's, it's a mix of, um, few good decisions, I would say. There was, there is no single bullet, magic bullet that is going to solve for sustaining or a business thriving in this market. It was constantly your eagerness to learn, your eagerness to explore, and then changing and adopting towards things that are coming in, like cloud came in and then, of course, at every point you understand that user behavior as well as what the market trends are saying and moved in that direction. So, of course, this really worked out well for you.
Few more things that I would want to learn here is that on this journey, when you're building such an immense product used by thousands and maybe millions of users, I'm not sure how many users you have right now, but, uh, I'm sure like there are hard decisions that you're taking about, like, uh, building something in-house and, uh, acquiring other companies, like once you just mentioned about one. So when, when there is a decision around building something in-house and, uh, like outsourcing it, can you just give us some example from your journey and, uh, how did you conclude on certain decisions like that?
Vladislav Maličević: Yeah, some, some of those, uh, decisions were, were made quite easily due to whatever constraints, right? So if you have, let's say, uh, if money is your constraint, obviously, and you, let's say, you have a few idle people on payroll, obviously, you go and build, um, start building, especially when you don't understand the magnitude of the, complexity of the problem, right? You don't see, you don't see the big picture in the beginning, right? You go into it somewhat naive. I can say, I mean, I was, uh, I was quite young at the time. If you don't know the, the, the magnitude of the, of the problem, if you don't see the, the, the whole, uh, scope of it, and you are, you have a white canvas, you go for it and you simply, you give it a try. So there was no, there was actually no, in the beginning there was no, um, um, nothing to, no decision to be made whether to invest or acquire or whatnot, because the money was not there, right? So, So let's say in the beginning, majority of decisions were, were built. Um, and then over time, you have the opportunity to change. You can focus, you can keep the core, core of the product to yourself and then, whatever is not core, you can try to outsource. The good thing with a, with a platform like ours is that once you have the platform in place, you can start building actually these, um, applications on top of it and you can make those applications to, to a product. So for example, uh, one more time, one more thing that happened last year, we entered magic, another magic quadrant last year for financial consolidation, which is a, let's say, um, off the shelf separate product from our core product, but it's built on top of the platform and it, and it's sold separately. Right? So there are, there are players obviously in the market who do just that, uh, have a product just for that, but we built it on top of our platform. So you get the platform and you get a, you get a financial consolidation of it and you can build any kind of, uh, business application with it. So, um, once you have applications like that, then, and if it's easy to package it like it is with Jedox, then you can come up with things like a marketplace, which we do have, right? We do have a marketplace. So we put these applications in the marketplace and then you can easily install them from there, and then, it's, I don't know, it covers 60, 70, 80, some, some, some cover 90 percent of the functionality out of the box, and then you just fill it up with life, with your information, and then, uh, off you go, right? It's, it's configured and you can use it, it's ready to use.
Um, so, uh, the kind of the decision is definitely the, um, um, you have, you have spend constraints, so, so you have to be cautious on, on the spend. Similarly with cloud, right? Do you go to public cloud or do you build and host, you know, you do collocate your servers, you build them yourself and run them yourself, uh, somewhere, right? Yeah, that kind of decision someone needs to make, and in the beginning, maybe decision-making is super easy. Yeah, of course, you go and you buy a pizza box and you put discs in it and CPUs and then you collocate it to the, at your nearest host of choice. But then, if you want to run it at scale, things like compliance come into place and you need to, attestations, you need ISO, SOX and CSA star, and whatnot. You cannot manage them anymore on the commodity hardware that, that fails every, every three months, something's broken and you need to take the system offline and things like that. So yeah, this is where, where you go into cloud and use services and build it, build it like a Lego, cherry-pick services that you need and build, build something out of it and outsource kind of responsibility to a, to a infrastructure provider of your choice. Same with code, right? Usually, in the beginning, if you have monetary crusades, but you have the means, if you have, uh, well, just a couple of people should be sufficient to get you going, right? That's the thing, right? In the beginning, this Pareto of 80/20, with 20 percent of, uh, personnel, of people, you can build a lot of products, you can build 80 percent of the product. But the last 20 percent of the product are the hardest, and then you need additional 80 percent of people to, to, to add on board. If you have the means, this is where you, you can make, uh, make decisions, whether you, you outsource it, uh, let it be built, or you take managed service, OM solution for the means, for the, for the particular case. I mean, nowadays, it would be totally different, right? You look from different perspective or from different dimensions and cost being just one of those, right?
Kovid Batra: Yeah.
Vladislav Maličević: You, uh. So, yeah, it depends. It depends on the context, right? In what kind of context and what kind of setup you are. We are scaled up and we are a mature company, profitable company nowadays, so we can afford ourselves to take a bit more time to make decisions such as outsourcing or buying, acquiring pieces of product into the whole. Whereas when you are at the beginning, usually you only have an idea and your free time and then you go and roll up your sleeves and you work, you code, you usually don't have money, right, to, to go and buy expensive services from others, right? Um, yeah.
Kovid Batra: Cool, Vlado. I think that's interesting. Um, we are running short on time, so we'll have to wrap up now, but it was a really interesting talk. Would, would love to talk more, uh, and know more details about what happened in those 20 years, what things you actually felt were very challenging that were solved, on those pieces, but I think that would need another episode and I would love to have you for another episode, absolutely.
Vladislav Maličević: Thanks a lot. Yeah. Let's, let's do that some other time.
Kovid Batra: Sure, absolutely. All right. So that's it for today. Thank you, Vlado. Thank you for your time. Uh, looking forward to host you once again, uh, very soon.
Vladislav Maličević: Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.
Kovid Batra: All right. See you. Bye.
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