David Cushman — HFS Research[00:05]
Hello and welcome to this, the latest Hot Vendor Fireside. I’m here today with Raveesh Dewan, who’s President and CEO of Joget. We named Joget a OneOffice Hot Vendor in Q3 2022 because it goes beyond just being another low-code solution. The firm incorporates the core development features in the growing low-code development tool market. Joget is a model for user-created APIs, governance, security, and licensing that’s truly innovative. We see Joget as an embodiment of decentralized development, allowing rich collaboration and co-development of applications while not sacrificing the performance, support, and security requirements of building low-code applications. Since software was first written, efforts have been focused on making it easier and more accessible to all. So, Raveesh, tell us how you’re going about doing that, and who for.
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[01:05]
Yeah. So, David, thank you so much for the opportunity. I’m glad to share my thoughts on Joget and answer your questions. The way it all started was — I’ve been on each side of the table, being an entrepreneur earlier, then in consulting, and then corporate America. So I’ve had my share of dealing with business applications from various perspectives. In my last stint in healthcare, I realized we were paying too much for building applications and maintaining applications, and started this thought process on how we can leverage open source. I found this small open source project and started figuring out the possibilities of where it can go. One thing led to another, and here I am, leading the company and owning it as well. It has been my passion to see how we can reduce the cost and accelerate the innovation that is required to change the world into a digital culture. A lot of companies have business applications, and they think that you convert a business application into a web application or a mobile app and it’s a digital transformation — that’s just step one you have taken. There is a lot to do past that. So that has been my passion, and I’m taking Joget to the world now.
David Cushman — HFS Research[02:45]
So tell me, I understand the background was very much in the open source community. Maybe tell the listeners here today what it is that you decided was important, that made you think, I’m going to take what’s happening in this open source community and turn that into a business. What did you see coming? What did you see that was wrong in the market that could be addressed by the idea you had?
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[03:02]
Yeah, David, I think two things are important. Why is open source important to me? It’s the innovation catalyst, in very simple terms. When you have a product that is bound by the imaginations of your own teams, it goes so far. But when you remove the barrier of your team and enable your customers to innovate on their own terms, it goes much farther than you can think of. They come up with things that you would not imagine. Joget is built on a very strong plug-in architecture, and we get amazed by our customers, the things that they do once they get hold of how to put a plug-in together. Their barriers to our next release are gone. So what you will find with Joget is a lot of things that customers ask for get converted into a plug-in that’s on the marketplace, and the next new release folds that in for future customers as well. So I feel that open source is an innovation catalyst. And the second most important thing is, as you share this journey across various customers, it helps us lower the cost also, which is an important factor for anyone and everyone when you’re doing the delivery. At times the cost does not matter, it becomes a cost of doing business, but we feel that the cost of innovation is also high, and we want to lower that down. That’s the goal with open source. Another important phenomenon that I observe in the industry is that any new technology that is game-changing in this emerging technology world is open source. Talk about big data, talk about IoT, talk about ChatGPT, OpenAI, talk about blockchain — blockchain is a big piece for the emerging technologies. You will see all these have an open source grade. And that’s what we very strongly believe in.
David Cushman — HFS Research[05:39]
That’s fascinating. I’m a big believer in the whole idea of open — I wrote a book called The 10 Principles of Open Business — and the whole notion of openness and connecting with others is obviously becoming very mainstream now. It’s very powerful. It’s part of our own OneEcosystem approach: understanding how different ecosystems, different partners in ecosystems, can create new sources of value by working together, and they have to work in a very open source kind of way to do that. So you won’t find an argument here against that. What I would challenge it with is perhaps something that you’ll hear from time to time: if you’re enabling everyone in the organization to create, to innovate, to start writing code effectively, there’s obviously risk, there’s the governance challenge. Now, Joget has taken big steps to tackle that. Maybe you could explain to our listeners what precisely that does, how you’ve identified the challenge in the first place, and what you’ve done to solve it.
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[06:55]
Yeah, actually, excellent question, David. I’ll just bring in an analogy there. If you look at spreadsheets or SharePoint, and back in those days, Lotus Notes — those were meant for everyone’s use. The moment you allow that, it grows and creates a mammoth of a problem. Now spreadsheets are everywhere, right? And it starts replicating data in ways that you didn’t intend to, which is one of the biggest problems with any of these tools that enable an end user to start leveraging and innovating. That is a very important aspect of what we are doing from Joget’s standpoint. We don’t want to limit you, but we want to give those insights to you from various environments: what is happening in your environments, who are the key people leading these changes, who are the key developers, who are the key process experts. Joget has a governance center; you can log into there and connect all your environments. You can see the activity in your dev and test, and who are your leaders and experts. You can create criteria based on certain parameters and start seeing your shining experts coming up, that you can leverage to further govern within the organization. And the other important thing is replication of data. You have customer data that you’re capturing and you have five different customer-facing teams. They will have five different databases or applications capturing the same information, and before you know it, you will be struggling with what is the source of truth. That’s something we enabled with the enterprise blocks within Joget, to govern a certain set of data that should not be replicated. And if you want to use it, there is a process — Joget comes with a process engine, so we have that process built in as a template for you in the governance. And guess what, you can choose to change it. The governance is built on Joget as well, so that enables you to modify the governance based on your organization. It’s going to be different for different organizations, no matter what. There is no silver bullet, but yes, there is a mechanism to manage that, and that’s what we have tried to do with the Joget governance center.
David Cushman — HFS Research[08:59]
So you’ve effectively baked governance into everything that anyone might create with Joget.
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[09:26]
Yes, yes. You enable the governance center to start listening to your environment and start creating, and limit the ability to move the applications from one environment to another through this governance framework. And now you can see all the activity that is going on, and govern and manage how the changes are being pushed into different environments. That’s huge from a governance standpoint.
David Cushman — HFS Research[09:57]
Sure, and does that work for every kind of coder? So you’ve got your citizen developer, you’ve got your professionals. What’s the difference, and can they all be accommodated on your platform?
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[09:57]
Yeah, brilliant question, David. Just to share my perspective there, there are two big sets of solutions. One is no-code solutions, right? You do everything in drag and drop. And one is low-code solutions, wherein professional developers have the ability to write code — they just write less code because of the framework. Our thought process is very different in that sense. We want to enable you from no-code to low-code to pro-code. The reason I say that is, when a business innovator is going to create an application and it’s a no-code application, they have dragged and dropped and created this process and created this app, and it is highly successful. No matter what you do, it will become complex tomorrow, and it will have highly custom needs just because of the success of the app. And it will grow. So what we want to do is enable that journey from no-code to low-code. You can tweak what is being generated with Joget; you can add your script to enhance it. And when it comes to pro-code, which means a highly custom need, I want to be able to create a new plug-in and enable a new drag-and-drop feature from an overall standpoint. You have that capability as well. So you go from no-code to low-code to pro-code, and all that is managed even in the governance center — uploading new plug-ins to the environment is completely managed, so it goes across the board. I know there are a lot of folks who tell us, oh, you want to be focused on a persona. Yes, we are focused on an enterprise persona that happens to have these three, this journey, and we want to deliver that.
David Cushman — HFS Research[12:10]
So who are you selling to? Who comes and signs on the dotted line?
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[12:10]
Excellent question, David. We are selling to large enterprise organizations and medium-sized enterprise organizations, the ones that really want to take their dollars an extra mile and enable themselves to deliver fast, and in some cases deliver at a lower cost also. A lot of the large enterprises that we have are more innovative and more open to newer and emerging technologies, and hence they adopted us. Just sharing an interesting fact: we didn’t have any salesperson in our organization until mid last year. It was purely by virtue of the enterprises who are more forward-looking and saw what technology can bring to the table, and they just adopted Joget. Being open source, we get thousands of downloads a month, and eventually they experiment and become a more informed customer, if you will.
David Cushman — HFS Research[13:31]
OK. And if you were to look ahead at the year we are now just about firmly entrenched in, what’s happening in the market? It’s clear there are lots of challenges going on globally — inflation, war, fuel prices — and it’s having some recessionary impacts. Are people turning to products like your own as a way of reducing their costs, keeping the lights on when maybe they’re short on coders, maybe they’re having to cut heads? What are the conversations you’re having with the market?
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[14:13]
Yeah, David, there is a lot going on in the market. There is a resource crunch in the market, resources to deliver applications. There is a high demand for digitization. I think this whole pandemic started or ignited this need across the board. And there is a need to go to a digital culture, if you will. The other phenomenon that we are observing is, we keep hearing about recession, but I’ll tell you what, the companies that are going to cut their IT costs to reduce cost are going to be the ones who will suffer, because this is not the time to cut cost. This is the time to maximize your dollars for what you’re doing. And automation — we hear a lot of times customers want to do this, but they don’t have the resources to deliver it, and that’s what is game-changing with applications or platforms like Joget. It’s not just building the application; maintaining it is equally important, getting it done and maintaining it over time. We want to make that whole journey easier. That’s the goal with Joget that we have. Now, another important phenomenon, I don’t know whether you’ve heard about this or not, is there was a time when these mammoth applications were built across various large enterprises. It is coming to a point where change is required so fast that that mammoth will not work. You have to disintegrate that into multiple smaller, smarter applications that can talk to each other. And I see that phenomenon happening across government, I see that phenomenon happening across all large organizations. They had these big, huge applications; they are not able to sustain that, and it has to be broken down into pieces, and I would say smarter pieces to talk to each other, to deliver higher business value and business agility that they need.
David Cushman — HFS Research[16:30]
A kind of atomization, so that you can reconfigure to be a better fit with the actual environment that’s emerging at pace, as we’ve all seen it. You mentioned the pandemic and the impact of that on driving people towards digitalization — stuff they’d been planning to do for years but suddenly found they had to do. You, I think, were involved with a Tech for Humanity program during, or as impacted by, the pandemic and people needing that. So I wonder whether you could explain what that involved for Joget.
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[16:52]
Yeah, actually, David, this is a subject near and dear to my heart. The pandemic changed everything. If your business was good in the pandemic, you have changed. If you were doing bad in the pandemic, you have changed no matter what. Every single business was impacted, and one of the ones that were hit hard were these not-for-profit organizations. They didn’t have any IT budget, or they had a very limited IT budget, and when everything went remote, it was difficult for them to operate. So what we did was we started a Tech for Humanity program for these not-for-profits. And we have funded various not-for-profits. I feel like some of the larger enterprises should learn from them how they take their dollar farther than you can imagine. I’ll give an example: we extended a Joget license to one of the Doctors Without Borders offices back in France. They had no IT staff, just volunteers, and they created a lab management system out of it. And we did the same with the Malaysian cancer research organization, MAKNA, and if you see the work that they’re doing with that, it is amazing. It is life-saving in some cases. So yes, we do have a Tech for Humanity program for any not-for-profits — a substantially discounted license, and I think a 25-user license without any cost, which is plenty for any not-for-profit to pick up and run with. And what they see, when they implement — there is one in India, Catalyst, amazing — they’ve built a system for training girls, with attendance and whatnot, all QR code scanning. It’s amazing what they have done. So that’s something I believe is a story that can go back to the mainstream to learn from, how they maximize their dollars when it comes to IT.
David Cushman — HFS Research[19:25]
That’s interesting. Yes, of course, it’s a lower-cost way for not-for-profits to actually engage in the digitalization journey everyone else has to go on. But what made you want to give it away like that? What was your inspiration?
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[19:25]
Yeah, I think, David, as I mentioned, one of the genes that Joget has is open source and being open. It’s not just about making profits, it’s about making a difference in the community. I strongly believe that when we give this away and we hear from them what they’re doing, it is amazing, and it’s heartening to see what they did with the platform with very limited resources and made it extremely efficient for themselves. And that brings back a lot of ideas to us about how else we can help our existing customers. So it’s not just a giveaway; we learn a lot from them.
David Cushman — HFS Research[20:44]
Fantastic. That warms my heart to hear that. It is this idea of paying it forward, maybe, that you’re giving something away and you do benefit from it. It’s not just a charity, it’s doing it because there’s benefit for both parties. So let’s have a little think now about what’s coming next for you, because that’s obviously been a very busy time, and we know what the challenges are like for this year. You mentioned getting involved in blockchain — perhaps you could explain why that is and where you think that might take the business for the next few years.
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[21:13]
David, at Joget we’re always looking forward. If you search for open containers and low-code containers, you will find us leading the journey. And we want to do the same for any and all emerging technologies, if you will. So we are working with the HBAR Foundation, Hedera, building a Hashgraph application studio for them, so you can create dApps without coding. We want to abstract that blockchain piece, make it easy for anyone to configure, connect to the chain, and start innovating, in very simple terms. Blockchain is not a tech problem, it’s more of a business problem. How would you solve that business problem? I think the business innovators are at the forefront of that, because it’s going to change the business model that you operate in, and giving them that ability to drag and drop and create something functional connected to the chain in real time, that’s what we’re doing. With Hedera, we’ve also built integrations with Cardano, Ripple, and Hyperledger Fabric. This is just to enable the community of innovators who are waiting for a blockchain developer. Which they will not find, because blockchain developers are more interested in doing the core work with blockchain, not building business apps around it. And that’s one reason why the adoption is lagging also. That’s something we are trying to make easy. In any business community, if they’re thinking about blockchain, let them try this out, let them come up with the application, not wait for a developer to come in. And we’re doing the same with IoT. We’ve partnered with Zebra, and Samsara is one of our customers. This is amazing — one of our customers back in Ireland built a shipping solution which tracks through IoT the whole journey of a high-valued shipment, starting from your truck to your ship to air, back to land, to the destination, and any deviations, they start getting alerts because it’s a high-valued shipment, all through IoT. I hear a lot about ChatGPT. In fact, I requested ChatGPT to write a poem on Joget — I’ll share that, I’m very excited about it. So the possibilities are endless. What we are looking for is how we can help. There are a lot of questions about, oh, can ChatGPT code, and all that. I think it’s more important to get meaningful work done. The synthesis becomes more difficult than the human mind processing all that data — synthesizing is the biggest problem. Writing code, we are trying to make it easy from low-code, no-code, but there is a lot more to go beyond that. Leveraging the technology — as I say, I can cut grass with scissors, but it’s not meant to do that, right? So leverage the tool for the right kind of problem to solve. A lot of times I go into blockchain discussions and they’re talking about, we want to do this, we want to put it on blockchain, only to find out you really don’t need blockchain, you use a database. What problem are you solving? It’s fascinating to put it on blockchain, but will it solve the problem that you’re trying to solve? So there are very interesting ways to look at this. We are exploring ways to synthesize the data that you’re capturing using the applications and make it more intelligent for you using ChatGPT and all.
David Cushman — HFS Research[25:18]
Well, I guess ultimately this journey towards making it easier for humans to do things with software ends up in the idea that — I think ChatGPT is headed towards this kind of thing — I ask it to do something and it just does it. Which I guess is the next step on the journey for the whole low-code, no-code piece: I simply tell some form of technology what it is I want to do, and it works out the best way to deliver that for me. Is that a journey you see no-code being part of, or is that going to be a separate tradition at the end of the day?
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[26:29]
I think it’ll merge one day, David, because there are two things that I see. One is demand. We talk about a developer shortage today; it is going to worsen, believe me, with the demand that is coming forward. A lot of things that were done in the last 20 years have to be undone in a new way, no matter what. And every customer wants to think, oh, how can I reuse my existing assets? But guess what, those are architected for an old architecture. Talk about cloud, containers — the whole thing has changed. Application architectures, everything has changed. Your tools have changed, your infrastructure has changed, the way you build the application has changed. You might be able to do it at a lower cost to replicate that application now compared to just reusing it. So when enterprises realize I can do it faster, I can do it cheaper than to modify that application and build it in a new way, this whole demand will shift in a very different way, and we will have no other way to fill this out but by augmenting ourselves. There’s no other way out. So that’s where I see a lot of possibilities of leveraging these newer technologies.
David Cushman — HFS Research[28:03]
So Raveesh, is there a final message you’d like to leave our audience with, perhaps something they should do this year if they haven’t already?
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[28:03]
My only suggestion and recommendation is, if you are a business innovator, if you are that developer, if you are that entrepreneur who has been waiting for resources — your journey need not wait for that. Pick up a low-code, no-code tool and give it a try. You will be surprised by yourself how much you can do within a very short period of time. We have seen customers go live in two to three weeks, David. Believe me, the art of the possible is there, and you will surprise yourself. That is my suggestion to enterprises: instead of being paranoid — oh, will it do this and will it do that, and will I be locked in — give it a try, you will surprise yourself no matter what.
David Cushman — HFS Research[29:17]
Raveesh, I think that’s a fantastic place to leave this today. Really appreciated your time. I hope the audience has got as much as I have from this conversation, so thank you very much indeed, and we’ll be watching Joget with real interest over the next few years, wishing you every success.
Raveesh Dewan — President and CEO, Joget[29:17]
Thank you. Thank you so much, David, and thank you to the audience as well for listening.
