Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
🎙 Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service, a podcast that takes you on a journey into the DNA of InterSystems. I will be your guide as we explore how our unparalleled commitment to customer service fuels limitless human potential.
🤝 Join us as we dive into the culture of InterSystems and share the stories of the people who make it all possible - our customers, partners, and employees. From helping healthcare providers improve patient outcomes to powering the world’s most important institutions, we’ll show you how our dedication to customer service excellence is in rarified air.
[00:00:00.170] - Jochen Deubner
If we're talking about things like IRIS possibilities, for example, we use integrated ML as a real big thing for future, for our customers to make liquidity forecasts, things like that. We also wanted to gain speed because speed is essential for us.
[00:00:17.890] - Narrator
Welcome to Rarified Air. Stories of Inspired Service. Our host, John Paladino, head of Client Services at InterSystems, will use his 40 years of experience to show you how to build a successful customer service program and highlight stories of innovation with customers. Join us as we explore the past, present and future of service, from AI's promise to the enduring power of the human touch.
[00:00:46.350] - John Paladino
Welcome to Rarified Air. With me today, actually again, because we've done this before, this is take two, is Jochen Deubner from Simba. We did our podcast last summer at our global summit. It came off great, but Global Summit is a very busy place to do a podcast. Here we are in Germany, and this is a great opportunity to spend more time with you, Jochen. Thanks again for being here. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and who Simba is.
[00:01:15.670] - Jochen Deubner
First of all, thanks for being here, taking another chance talking to you. It's fine. Second time, it's just great talking to you. We could make a third one if we want. My career started in the late 1990s and I worked for Hewlett-Packard as an IT project manager. All of a sudden reading the newspaper and there was an ad from a small company named Simba and they were looking for a software developer for their bookkeeping system. I just thought that is great because that's kind of perfect match in terms of my own education.
[00:01:54.870] - Jochen Deubner
I'm an educated tax consultant assistant, and I do a university degree in Business IT. That's kind of perfect fit, I thought. It's been more than 20 years ago now and I'm still there with Simba. I started as a software developer and I just recall the first day stepping into Simba, and that's been a real nice one because that was the first day I got connected to InterSystems somehow. I stepped in there and there's been a person that handed me over a book about five inches thick that was titled Micronetics MUMPS.
[00:02:28.030] - Jochen Deubner
I thought about, "What am I doing here? Should I read about diseases? What is that?" But the next couple of weeks I dived into and I've learn that this is just amazing stuff, that this is a great database, it's a really fast database and I like to program it and it's been real nice doing things in there. As of today, I'm CTO at Simba. Being responsible for all of the tech staff development, IT. We started as a simple bookkeeping software.
[00:02:58.310] - Jochen Deubner
At that time, our competitors at the market were just companies that had data centered versions of their software system. All of the data was inside a big data center with AIX systems, VAX systems, things like that. The idea of Simba has been to provide on premise version of a bookkeeping software so that everyone, every customer has got its data in house. That's kind of changing idea on that market at that time. I can say we grew together with InterSystems these years, because recap that, I've been employee number 15 or 16, something like that. Nowadays, we are more than 120 people in there. I think compared to InterSystem, there are smaller figures, but we have common growth together during the last 30 or more years.
[00:03:53.800] - John Paladino
No, I can really relate to that, because we're both old timers. I've been with InterSystems a long time, since 1985. You can do the math. When I joined, we had fewer than 20 people, and we, too, grew and changed, adapted, innovated. Our customers expectations have changed on the way I'm sure yours have too.
[00:04:16.000] - Jochen Deubner
Yeah, true. That's for sure. Because if we put what we do, it's kind of enterprise resource planning system for tax consultants, as well for companies and social institutions, but mainly for tax consultants. Things have evolved very fast.
[00:04:30.330] - Jochen Deubner
First of all, I think one has to understand what Simba is doing internally. This software system, it has kind of an external declarative effect. If you imagine a tax consultant producing a tax statement for his customer, this goes to the legal tax department. If he produces a balance sheet, for example, this has to be published officially in Germany so that everyone is able to have a look at that in the country. This is what I mean by external effect. This is kind of what we're evolving through all the years, and this is why we're technology driven, in order to get these things out to the customer.
[00:05:09.080] - John Paladino
How has the technology served you over the two to three decades? Have you had to rewrite your application or make major changes in your application?
[00:05:18.810] - Jochen Deubner
We did that partially, but I think this rewriting is kind of an ongoing process. You have to spend 10% of your time, I think that's my own opinion, on going to rewrite your application in order to keep it up and living. That's what we did. But if we're talking about things like IRIS possibilities, for example, we use integrated ML as a real big thing for future, for our customers to make liquidity forecasts, things like that. We also wanted to gain speed because speed is essential for us.
[00:05:49.900] - John Paladino
You have to continually make it scalable, reliable, secure.
[00:05:54.520] - Jochen Deubner
That's a part. This kind of external declarative effect, that means that our software could not have any errors. It has, that's kind of IT development, but it shouldn't have, because it has to be rock stable, it has to be hardened, it has to be fault intolerant. When you provide something that has this external effect, you're always in charge of what's happening if things are going wrong. If that tax statement that's officially published is just wrong, we get a major problem outside. What we need in here is a software solution that gives us the opportunity to develop in a very fast way, to develop things that are really rock stable, and that is part of our business.
[00:06:36.400] - John Paladino
It's like we live in parallel universes in a way, because your company is private and evolved and highly successful, and your customers needs have certainly increased. Naras have too. We've enjoyed a great partnership working together. For our listeners, why don't we both share how we see serving our customers evolving from the past to the future? Would you like to go first, Jochen?
[00:07:02.830] - Jochen Deubner
This is kind of evolvement. I think if we're talking about tax business on our side. If we look at what we've done in the past and what we have to do in the future, German tax law is constantly changing. What's the effort to be put on this is, if this is constantly changing, you have to have a system that goes with you in these changes. I can give an example.
[00:07:27.580] - Jochen Deubner
The German legislative process is a rather interesting one because, it somehow reminds me of some IT project management. If you have a team and you got an estimation of a task that will last one week, and you give that to your team, it will last one week or more. That's just the same with the German legislation process. This one lasts one year, even if they could have been finished it by, let's say, three or four months.
[00:07:51.060] - Jochen Deubner
We often get last changes by 27th or 28th of December, and they gain validity January 1st. That narrows down the time frame of development to just a couple of days. This is something that the database system InterSystems provides us with, is giving us the possibility to implement in such a small-time frame. This is real rapid application development.
[00:08:21.650] - Jochen Deubner
If we're talking about the customer there, what we are doing, and we're not delivering software at that very moment, this is not true I think. We're building some kind of level of trust. This is what I think is just the intrinsic part of that. Because if our customer, and I think that's the same as within their system, if the customer trusts you, that you're capable of delivering this kind of stuff in just a couple of days, and the tax consultant knows about the changes, and he also knows that he will have to have them at January 1st, or at least during January. If you are able to deliver that with your system, he trusts you and then he will stick with you forever. That's just kind of customer care that reflects stability in this customer experience.
[00:09:11.810] - John Paladino
That's amazing. The degree of trust keeps on increasing and the demand, because of the changing environment, continues to increase. Your principles are really for the long term success of your clients. At the end of the day, your software and our software doesn't really matter. It's the success of your customers that really matters. That's the most important thing. We love to talk about software, don't we? But at the end of the day, it's about their success.
[00:09:39.240] - John Paladino
Same thing for us. The partnership aspect of our business is really important. Partnership to me means how you respond when things don't work, but also how you work together to prevent things from going wrong in the first place. We continue to increase the way we work with our partners to work better at quality delivering software features faster because our customers need it. I don't know about two days. I don't know if we can make the release in two days, but we're working toward that. But our principles and support are to help the customers. We don't have any barriers to getting the help that you need.
[00:10:25.460] - Jochen Deubner
That's just great because, I recognize this from the very beginning of our partnership. I recall one thing during our migration from Cache to IRIS, and I think that reflects this kind of customer care, I think. While migrating, we faced some performance issues indeed. We called Worldwide Response Center. I recall that's been the first and only time in my life with InterSystems that I opened a crisis call there. I think you could explain better what a crisis call is, but in my own words, this is from on there, everybody's working 24/7 to solve this issue. That is just what the US guys did with us. We built kind of a task force and got this thing solved in a couple of days. That was just great seeing this kind of effort, this passion for customer and customer success out there, because that's our own DNA too.
[00:11:23.440] - John Paladino
Yeah, it's immediate response is putting our best people on the front lines. As you said, in a crisis, all the bells go off. We tend to swarm it, and quite often developers are directly involved. They're excused from doing development until we solve the customer crisis, even if it has nothing to do with our software.
[00:11:40.840] - Jochen Deubner
Yeah, that's a really important point I think. It doesn't matter kind of what level you're living, if there's a sea level or whatever. You should take care of your customer. That is what we also do. I recall an example, and that's just a great one. Because it tends back to 2010, something like that.
[00:12:01.320] - Jochen Deubner
At that time, InterSystems ended lifecycle of... It's been two k block size databases, something like that. We knew that we had lots of those databases outside, and we knew that we have to migrate. InterSystems provided a command line tool. We sat down internally and thought of, "What should we do then? We have several thousand customer sites out there. How could we migrate their databases? I can't drive around in Germany and my team cannot drive around too. I couldn't spend people doing this." We sat down and we also called Worldwide Response Center and we called sales engineers and thought of, "What can we do in order to automate this?"
[00:12:44.810] - Jochen Deubner
At this very time, I joined my first global summit in Orlando. I think at that time it was called DEF CON. It was still called DEF CON. I joined this DEF CON, and I had the chance to talk to the former Vice President for development and software. This was just amazing because I didn't think of being able to talking to that kind of co Vice President level. If you look at other companies, that is a no go. You can't do that. But with IntreSystems, I could have the chance.
[00:13:19.790] - Jochen Deubner
I recall both of us standing there drinking coffee, talking about our situation. I just remember clearly what he said to me in the end. He said, "Until the end of this very DEF CON, you get a solution for an automation for this." At first sight I thought, "Yeah, okay, nice talking about but I can't believe that." Because as I know from my own position, there's a gap between someone telling, "Yeah, I will deliver tomorrow and the team's doing to do this."
[00:13:54.620] - Jochen Deubner
Two days later I flew home, and one work day later I got a call from InterSystems. They were telling me, "Your tool's ready, your tool's there, you will get it with the next upcoming release. If you want to have it now, you'll get an ad hoc for this." This was just amazing. This was amazing because that is kind of dedication to customer success on every level of a company. That is what our own DNA is as well.
[00:14:25.500] - John Paladino
That's why we bring developers to our global summit, previously called DEF CON, to spend time with customers. It's not a marketing event. In a way it's an educational event, but it's also to hear what challenges or what aspirations our customers, our partners have and how we can help get them there, how we can make you successful, so you can make your customers successful. It's also a very good example of going the extra mile. We like to go the extra mile in lots of different scenarios.
[00:14:59.180] - John Paladino
I'll share with you. We have a Monday morning senior management meeting. Half the meeting is about customer experiences, and by that I mean fixes we sent to a customer. I remember that event in 2010, because you were on my report that we had this interaction at DEF CON, which was fantastic and we were able to meet the need. We had to follow through, of course. But our CEO really wants to know what are we doing to help our customers in the product and support. What fixes we send to customers. If a customer had an event like an outage, even if it's not related to us, it doesn't matter. If a customer is down, we all look bad. How does your management meeting work?
[00:15:43.580] - Jochen Deubner
It's just about the same. If we bring that down to a point, it's all about responsibility. That's just what customer care in itself, I think. I always tell people and new employees, be responsible for what you do. That doesn't mean you have to do everything and be responsible for everything, but you have to take care of problems and it doesn't matter on which level you're living. This is just a customer view and customer perspective you have to take in order to get this responsibility. That's the core of customer care and a core of partnership.
[00:16:21.650] - John Paladino
I love that saying. We have some sayings too. The one that just popped to mind is, "When you're in a situation and you're not sure what to do, to do what's right for the company or the customer, do what's right for the customer."
[00:16:34.130] - Jochen Deubner
That's perfect. That's really perfect. In my spare time, if there is one, I like to do athletics. I've done that for nearly the whole of my life. I'm a javelin thrower. I'm still doing that today while getting older and less mobile, but it works and I'm still doing this.
[00:16:52.900] - John Paladino
That's fantastic.
[00:16:53.950] - Jochen Deubner
This is just something that could be compared to that. That's what I always think of when talking about this kind of responsibility. If that throw is not good enough, I have to think about who's responsible. I could blame the wind, I could blame clothes, whatever I can think of, but that won't help. That won't help me to cope with that. The only thing is, I have to be responsible for what I'm doing here. If there is wind, I have to change the angle of my throw or something like that, or I have to train harder, but I have to be responsible for what I'm doing here.
[00:17:28.240] - John Paladino
You're going to have this image in my head of a big problem in front of you and you taking out your javelin.
[00:17:34.670] - Jochen Deubner
That would be a great thing. I have to try that.
[00:17:38.930] - John Paladino
If we talk about the future in terms of where the challenges are ahead of us, ChatGPT and kind of large language models, and obviously we don't really know what challenges that's going to bring for us. It's interesting right now, I think the challenges ahead are complexity, and you mentioned complexity earlier.
[00:17:59.330] - Jochen Deubner
Yeah. Complexity is one of the biggest issues in future. If we make that point on this new AI stuff, ChatGPT, things like that, what's it in core? It will change how people interact with software in the future. That is the main core thought of this. If we're looking at that, what did we do for the past 10 or 20 years? We were building nice user graphical user interfaces with buttons and input fields, things like that. In my mind, I do have people talking to their software or chatting with their software, and this is also this kind of complexity we're talking about. This is narrowing down complexity in terms of that we're interacting with software systems in a totally normal way, like both of us sitting here today talking to each other. I think that will be the case in the future.
[00:18:56.890] - John Paladino
I think the complexity is our problem, not our customers problems. We don't want to make our products more complex. We want to make them simpler to use, especially for developers who are building solutions.
[00:19:07.750] - Jochen Deubner
That's great.
[00:19:08.530] - John Paladino
Jochem, I really appreciate you joining us for this podcast. This has been fascinating. Thank you for your long term partnership. Thank you for your trust. I look forward to working with you for another 30 years.
[00:19:20.920] - Jochen Deubner
Thank you for being here John.
[00:19:21.890] - Narrator
Thanks for listening today. If you have any questions or want to hear from a specific guest, email us anytime at inspiredservice@intersystems.com. When you're ready to unlock the potential of your data and experience the transformative power of support done differently, go to intersystems.com.