Independent Software Vendor Partner Program – Jethro Borsje, Mendix

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back to techstrong tv.

I'm really happy to have a first time, uh, guest here with me on Textron today. Uh, his name is Jeff, Jeff Thoreau. I'm gonna mispronounce it and I did it so well in practice, but it's J ro Boche and if I messed it up, I'm gonna have him say it right.

But J Jeff Ro is the, uh, chief Ecosystem Solutions Officer at Mendix. Say your name right. And I apologize for butchering it there.

I did so well in practice. Yep. We practiced so well.

No, jetro, Bors. Uh, its pretty, pretty decent, I would say. Yes.

All right, jetro, thank you. So, so jetro Chief Ecosystem Solutions Officer at Mendix. Yeah, there's, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot of water underneath that title though.

Let's, let's hear a little bit about your story and your journey to how you come here today. Yeah, of course. So, um, my journey, uh, for Mendix actually started already years ago when I, uh, became CT o of a mendix partner.

And we used Mendix to create, uh, actually create net new ip, which we, uh, started to commercialize as well as doing, uh, specific, uh, services engagements with customers using Mendix and low-code. Well, fast forward a couple of years later, uh, we got acquired by Mendix and Ivy became part of the Mendix management team responsible for growing our Mendix ecosystem. Uh, because I bring in the partner, let's say, perspective, uh, to our company, my role is now to work with, uh, partner small and large, ranging from, from smaller partners in specific countries, all the way up to, uh, AWS and sap.

Uh, and to work together on how we can bring our, uh, soil to the customers. Fantastic. And where are you based jetro?

I'm based in, uh, the Netherlands, uh, and close to our ROT dame office. Oh, okay. We were just out there for, uh, actually for cloud native C N C F, uh, cloud Native Con CubeCon.

No, actually, now that I think of, it's probably about two months ago. It was beautiful, beautiful. Out in Amsterdam was the height of Tulip season.

What a beautiful City. Yeah. Yes.

Um, anyway, though Mendix, it's a name. Mendix is a, is a, not just a name, but a company that our audience, I think should be familiar with. We've covered Mendix many times, and, you know, in our low-code no-code kind of coverage.

But for those people who maybe are not as familiar, you know, or they think they do, but they're not sure, why don't you give them a little corporate background before we jump into things? Sure. So, uh, Mendix is a, uh, we, we provide our customers with the capability to build, uh, what we say better apps faster or to turn ideas into outcomes.

Uh, using our low-code platform, we, uh, exist for 17 or 18 years by now. And, uh, we're actually proud to say that we, uh, practically invented the space of low-code application development, at least in this modern wave. Uh, we are now five years in, uh, being part of Siemens.

So, uh, Siemens is our model company. Um, and what we do is help our customers across many different verticals to, uh, to, to turn their IDs into outcomes. Excellent.

And, and you're right. I mean, this, this so-called low-code, no-code Wave has really, I don't know if it's crested, like, I don't know if it's reached its height, but it's certainly got a lot of momentum behind it. And, you know, one of the things I think driving it is the whole digital transformation movement where, look, we, we've gotta make everything digital, right?

Especially during the pandemic. I mean, it was imperative if you were in digital, you were kind of outta business. Yeah.

Um, but it's continuing still, right? The, the march onward to going digital. And so I, when I look at low-code, no-code, I see sort of two kind of rivers, if you will.

Two, two more, two roads. One, one is using low-code, no-code platforms such as Mendix to help developers do more faster, right? They have to write less code to get their apps done.

But these are professional developers who are code savvy. And so you give them, you give them some power tools, if you will, like mendix a man, you really accelerate their, their results, right? Their, their ability to finish things off quickly.

But then there's sort of the so-called citizen developer, right? Um, where, you know, departments within organizations who are not traditionally it maybe perhaps recognize that they need some digital muscle, right? It would be good to have this app for hr, it would be good for our salespeople to have this sort of app.

It's our customer service. People need that. And rather than going through sort of the traditional scoping and time and effort of an overworked, highly paid IT team, there are things we can get done rather quickly with powerful tools such as Medix, Medix, um, and these are both valid.

It, it's not, it's not, one doesn't replace the other. It's not a either or, it's a both. And wondering how you guys have what, you know, what's Mendix view of that?

Yeah, that's a, that's a good question because indeed you could cater towards two different personas. If you look at the development part of the application lifecycle, and that's pro developers or well, uh, our friends at WS, for example, called Business technologists, or what Microsoft call citizen developers. Mm-hmm.

Uh, we look at more added, like what type of use cases do we believe we, uh, we can really have an impact with other enterprise customers? And that is specifically, um, that's not necessarily departmental apps per se. Uh, for us it's much more about enterprise grade use cases in the core of our customers customer base, which really make a difference.

So for example, post and l customer of ours, Dutch Postal Services, they out millions of packages per day on a microservices landscape built on top of the Mendix platform combined with certain AWS technologies. So for us, it's about really going for enterprise grade workloads. Um, that's not to say you can also build, uh, departmental apps, right?

Of course that happens. Um, but we truly believe that there is a, uh, a market for low-code application development in the heart of the enterprise, uh, catering towards people who, who, who are, who know how to automate those processes. It actually means that for us, professional developers have a role in our, in application lifecycle, but, uh, so do business technologies, for example, when it comes to ideation, scope, definition, uh, also feedback providing, uh, once, once app goes live, all of that for us is part of the application lifecycle.

And in our platform, we capture the whole thing from the first portfolio management sessions and, and the first, uh, scoping sessions all the way up to when an app is in production operated. So we cater towards all of these different personas in a low-code way. So the business has a role to play.

Administrators have a role to play, and so do developers. So it's not only about faster development is also about how do you facilitate the company to drive the right decisions on their portfolio? How do you think about value assessments?

How do you get customer or end user feedback fed back into development teams? All of those different topics are part of, uh, of our platform. So it's broader than we only build eps Foster.

Excellent. And thank you for that chat though. All right.

If you don't mind, I'd like now to turn to kinda, you know, this is kind of in your wheelbarrow, right? In your, uh, sweet spot, and that is dealing with independent software vendors, ISVs, uh, Mendix has recently has a, is this a, a brand new program or an upgrade to an existing program? You know how, I mean, there's a programmatic approach to it.

Yeah, I, I can comment to that. So we recently, uh, let's say refunded our ISV or in software, uh, vendor program. It was an existing program, uh, for like a year or so, which was basically our first iteration where we tested in the market some IDs.

We figured out what works, what doesn't work from various points of view technical, but also specifically business models, for example, how you enable partners. We're now at the states that we're going from start to structure, so we're structuring it more, and we went more public, uh, more outbounds on, uh, on this program. Um, so what we've launched is a way for software vendors, really existing software vendors, uh, to monetize their ip, their unique IP using low-code, because, um, while we see many enterprises using low-code to build custom software, we think the software vendor market is actually also, uh, very much there, uh, to be able to benefit, uh, from low software development because they can find product market fits faster.

They can reply to the, the feedback of their customers faster. So it allows them to create better software for their customers in a low-code way. At the same time, it also allows our existing enterprise customer base to tap into the IP that our I s V partners now have, right?

You want to also bring supply and demand here together and, and orchestrate that. So, uh, for example, we have companies who are looking into, um, uh, extending, for example, certain core systems they may have in a low-code way, and you have software vendors of those core systems now also building mendix based solutions on top, uh, which our insurance customers now can buy. They already have a low-code capabilities where they can already adapt these solutions themselves also in a low-code way.

So I really want to, uh, uh, bring these worlds closure together. Excellent. Excellent.

You know, I look in my background, I, I was a, I ran channel sales. com bubble days, I actually helped start a company that was what we called an ASP application service provider. Yep.

And we were back in the day providing Lotus Notes hosting PeopleSoft, Oracle apps, and those were the big ones, right? That, but there were many, many small ones where we had ISVs, and this is before there was a cloud per se, right? Right.

And, and so what we were doing was we were setting up ISVs to sell sort of hosted versions of their software. I wouldn't call it SaaS. No.

Cause it wasn't multi-tenant. It wa it wasn't anything like we have now. We were, this was early, but we had an ISV program similar to this, and one of the, and I was, that was my baby.

I, I, you know, much in, as your role is. And, um, one of the challenges were that ISVs come in so many different shapes and sizes, and you mentioned it, you may have an AWS or a Microsoft kinda ISS v right? Who, who's working with mendix down to, you know, three guys in a garage who came up with a pretty cool app they built with it.

Yep. And so fashioning a program that gives them all a, not an equal shot. Obviously some companies are bigger than others, but gives everyone a fair chance to benefit from this program, is that's the check, right?

That's I think where it, you know, takes some thinking. Yeah. That, that's the hard bit.

So in our program, every different companies have different places, right? So we have, uh, a group of, uh, in the current, if I look at the current distribution across our partners, which we have signed up today, uh, around 70 or so, and from top of my head, um, we have a group for which we classify as startups, right? Indeed.

Two or three guys in an attic somewhere building, for example, something for sustainability of something in the HR domain. We have that. Um, but, and that's all the way up to, for example, a company called, uh, Socotra.

They are a, uh, core, uh, systems provider in insurance. They built a policy system, for example, in claims, and they are now extending their core headless system, uh, with Mendix solutions to interact with their end users. So that's, let's say the other end of the spectrum.

And we treat, of course, these partners in different ways. So the way we enable them from a technical point of view is different. Uh, you can look at different types of business models.

So for us, um, different types of partners of the different places, the main focus lies on existing software advantage, which have experience with the motion. So we are, let's say, skilled at things like product management, product, uh, marketing, for example, right? Have an r and d team, um, or at least have a, a, have a true ambition to build that up.

What we do not want to do per se, is sign up everybody who has a random good idea, right? That needs to be focused. So we also do things like business case validation as part of our program.

Excellent. So ISVs out here listening to this interview, jetro, how did they, how did they reach out? How did they get involved in the program?

com and, uh, and go there. There's a button there for partners, and you go to ISV and then, uh, you sign up. But happens then, if you get into the program, so we have a team there who starts to engage with an individual.

I s V starts to talk about, uh, in what market are you active? Like, which segment there, what's your id, what's the business case you have for yourself? How do you price your products?

Basically going through the business case. And, and there go to market strategy to see if it fits or not, if it makes sense to us. And based on that, um, uh, we start to of course, uh, uh, settle on the commercials.

What then happens is we have a p p in a post-contract phase. Once the contract is signed, the post-contract phase starts. And that's where we look at how do we technical technically enable them?

How do we make sure they understand a few of the key differentiators Mendix has, uh, which no other low-code vendor, uh, out there actually has to make is V successful? How do they use those, uh, those components? So we train them on that.

There's also a specific training track on our Mendix Academy, which they can follow. Then at some point, they, uh, they have built their solution. They start to sell it.

Uh, and then we look at are there opportunities for, for example, a joint marketing efforts like a joint webinar or a blog on our website where there can be various different things depending on the size of the partner, where we can also help them in their go-to market phase, uh, basically so we have clear gates and, and, and steps, which we, uh, guide them with along the way. Excellent. com.

That's M E N D I X. Yeah, exactly. All right.

Chat. I want to thank you for being our guest here on Textron TV and, and giving us a little background on the updated I S V program, continued success to all our friends at Mendix. Yep.

Um, look forward to hearing more soon. Likewise. Thank you very much.

All right. Mandex here on Techstrong tv. We're gonna take a break.

Uh, we'll be right back with another guest.