Unified BI player Jedox enters Asia, fires salvo at rivals

• Open Singapore office, acquires APAC distributor Naked Data
• Believes that being a small player allows it to fill gaps left by the big boys

GERMAN unified business intelligence (BI) solutions provider Jedox AG has established its first physical presence in Asia with the launch of its Singapore office, and couldn’t resist a jab or two at its rivals.
 
“We want to make sure our customers have a new experience versus SAP, IBM or the guys which take long years of implementation and whose customers are not satisfied and are still locked-in with these solutions,” declared chief executive officer Kay-Ingo Greve (pic).
 
Jedox specialises in what it calls self-service business intelligence and performance management tools. At the Singapore office launch, Greve and his vice president of Asia, David Upton, said the new office will be looking to hire both sales and technical staff to boost its regional operations.
 
The launch coincided with its acquisition of its Asia Pacific distributor, Australian-based Naked Data, for an undisclosed sum.
 
Jedox said it will continue to work with current partners such as Lightstream Analytics and Reach Technologies to support current customers, while looking for new ones.
 
SEA strategy

Jedox is aiming to become the “preferred cloud partner” for businesses in Singapore by the first half of 2016, although it did not say how it would quantify this.
 
“We think we have better models, better solutions and a broader focus … we can help integrate from the sales planning to finance planning perspective,” claimed Greve.
 
“This will make us successful against others like Anaplan,” he said, taking a jab at another rival.
 
“We want to bring [our global] customers to the cloud from the on-premises world they come from.
 
“Our customers want to innovate in Asia, and they can only innovate in Asia if they take IT to the next level,” he added.
 
Jedox expects that its Singapore office would boost its business also because some customers had been wary of deploying its solution without the company’s physical presence.
 
“We want to double our Asian market, which is currently about 15% of our global business,” said Greve.
 
Another driver is the Asean Economic Community that the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) is establishing, although Upton noted that “it’s early days.”
 
“When Europe when through the European Community and the European Union many years ago, there were compliance issues with cross-country organisations,” he said.
 
Singapore plays a key role in more ways than one, with Greve calling out the support the Government gives both to IT companies as well as small and medium enterprises with regards to IT investments.
 
The Government’s grants and tax rebates for technology investments would enrich the ecosystem and allow it to grow, he said.
 
Then there is Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative that has spawned a data-as-a-service pilot – Jedox plans to be a part of the push into big data.
 
South-East Asia is split into developed and developing economies, but Upton (pic) pointed out that even developing countries such as Indonesia are growing very rapidly. This is where a “nimble player” like Jedox can play a part.
 
“The big players are not interested in providing services or infrastructure in places like Indonesia – their perspective is that they [customers] will use it wherever they put it,” Upton claimed.
 
“But the reality is that countries are concerned about sovereignty … and having local infrastructure makes it different,” he added.
 
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