Pallas Athena´s CEO John Hoogland featured in the March issue of Oracles Link Plus Magazine | Pallas Athena
Pallas Athena´s CEO John Hoogland featured in the March issue of Oracles Link Plus Magazine
PrintPLUS+ is a quarterly magazine created by LinkPlus and Oracle companies. PLUS+ is targeted for ORACLE customers and business partners. Expert writers present news from the business life, technology trends, Oracle technologies and business partners, success stories, files related with new technologies and sample projects from Turkey and all over the world.
Mr. John Hoogland from Pallas Athena was featured in the March issue of the Turkish Oracle LinkPlus Magazine. Mr. Hoogland was interviewed together with one of Pallas Athena’s Turkish clients; Mr. Ali Alkan from Infor A.
Mr. Hoogland is the founder of Pallas Athena, a software company with the vision to help organizations improve their business performance and efficiency. Pallas Athena is one of the fastest growing global Business Process Management (BPM) companies, making a difference to the business performance and efficiency of more than 2000 companies every day. Mr. Hoogland’s area of expertise is to translate innovative ideas into usable Business Process Management Software. He was the first to introduce Case Management concepts in the BPM market and the first to embed Process Mining technology in the BPM life cycle. He is well known and recognized in the international BPM community.
Below is an excerpt of the original article translated into English.
Q: John, thank you for your time for this interview. Can you please introduce yourself?
A: My name is John Hoogland. I am the CEO and Chairman of Pallas Athena´s Board. Together with Paul Berens (our CFO), I founded Pallas Athena in 1993 with the vision to help organizations improve their business performance and efficiency.
Q: Please introduce your company quickly. Where do you come from?
A: We are one of the most innovative software vendors in the business process management market. We are privately held, with 18 years of profitable growth and a global active company with almost 2000 customers. Our business is to provide software and expertise to mine, refine, and manage processes that link people, and systems together. Our solutions provide exception handling for processes, people and individual cases. We provide value to leading organizations to boost efficiency and increase agility. Our technologies for Process Mining, Case Management and Document Composition are recognized worldwide and are in use in all the major vertical sectors. Our service is endorsed by a selective partner network we have built up for years. Our key partners in Turkey are Oracle and InforA.
Q: Pallas Athena has the reputation as one of the most innovative BPM Software Vendors worldwide. Where does this come from?
A: This is a very good question and a striking aspect of Pallas Athena´s story is, that throughout its history, we always managed to introduce the latest process management related innovations into our offerings. The reason behind success is our team. We are very passionate about what we do. For example our customers appreciate how quickly and effectively we turn around their requests into real customer value. And we are very happy to work so closely with our clients, which makes us understand, how we can make a difference to their success.
Q: The past years Pallas Athena has proven to be a company that consistently is growing internationally. What is the secret behind your success?
A: We have to convince customers and partners to pay for everything we do. For the last 18 years, we built up a strong customer base of almost 2000 clients. It looks like we did the right things in the right way.
Q: What is Pallas Athena’s pitch in 3-4 sentences?
A: We empower companies to understand, continuously improve, and control business processes. We provide technology and expertise to prompt management to take corrective action. Rather than starting all over again, Pallas Athena´s approach has the power to add transparency, identify risk and opportunity to make you significantly save time and money. We are different because we deliver a product based process improvement methodology to make change happen fast. We are unique because we reduce risk while helping you to adapt and gain control.
Q: What do you think about the Turkish market for Pallas Athena?
A: We are very excited about Turkey as a country and its people. Tobias Rother our VP Sales is working with Turkish clients for years and he always talks very highly about the good experience he has made with Turkish customers and partners such as Oracle, Finar, and InforA. On January 27, 2010 we hosted an Executive Event together with our Partner InforA, at The Marmara Hotel in Istanbul and we really appreciated many leading Turkish Companies joining the event. We strongly believe that with our unique Process Mining technology, organizations can accelerate the investments made in advanced analytics and data mining solutions to unlock the value in their business processes for gaining quick wins.
Q: Can you please give us an example on how to best use your Process Mining technology?
A: Internal Audit Departments in Corporate Organizations such as Banks or Insurance firms frequently investigate and assess areas of risk in processes as well as look for ways to improve quality and efficiency of processes. The "As is" process is typically discovered by a walkthrough, by workshops, by interviews as well as being supported by data mining tools. With a quick walkthrough, users can observe many things, but the full picture will be often hazy. It is quite a challenge to
- identify the most complicated cases
- find out exceptions in processes
- detect policy violations and unusual transactions
- find process needles in proverbial haystacks
- check that processes as designed are also being executed the same way
- verify if internal controls, such as authorizations, are performed correctly
Our Process Mining Software provides a sophisticated process discovery approach so a new level of transparency to organisations for increased audit coverage and assurance will be achieved. Process Mining automatically retrieves data in order to reconstruct the current underlying business processes. This methodology empowers organisations to quickly identify possible risks within processes by auditing against 100 % of the cases.
With Process Mining, processes can be investigated fast and efficient. Audits can be delivered exact and complete and risk can be detected and visualized. With this, we deliver the most effective solution in this area by eliminating month of labour intensive exploration time to immediately being able to detect embedded areas of risk.
Q: What role does Oracle play in your strategy to grow in Turkey and internationally?
A: Oracle is and always has been a very important partner to us. Just last week we heard from one of the Senior Executives at Oracle Central Europe that they have never seen software capable to reconstruct processes from data the way we can do. We believe Process Mining software helps Oracle clients to leverage from the investments made into Oracle Database and Business Intelligence. Beyond this, we also believe that our best Case Management BPMS offering is a great add on for Oracle customers looking beyond BPEL for agility delivered to the expertise of user, for example, to manage exceptions efficiently.
Q: Can you please elaborate on the partnership with InforA?
A: Last year both Pallas Athena and InforA announced a strategic partnership to combine our Process Mining technologies with InforAs implementation and training methodologies. We strongly believe that the agreement creates a triple win. With Process Mining, InforA clients can accelerate the investments made in advance analytics and data mining solutions to unlock the value in their business processes for gaining quick wins. InforA wins by extending their BI and analytics business to Process Mining and with this, accessing wealth of opportunities to discover process complexity, performance and risk. Pallas Athena wins a partner with lasting experience in leveraging large amounts of data of any type from any location.
John Hoogland, Ali Alkan, Tobias Rother,
CEO Pallas Athena CEO InforA CMO & VP Global Sales Pallas Athena
“Pallas Athena´s CEO John Hoogland featured in the March issue of Oracles Link Plus Magazine”