Executive Voices 2 mins read

Empowering Freedom in a Truly Connected World

Having the freedom to take advantage of a truly connected world sounds so simple, so powerful.

Bernd Gross Bernd Gross

A truly connected world is all about connecting the physical world and the virtual world via the Internet of Things.

Having the freedom to take advantage of a truly connected world sounds so simple, so powerful.

Powerful? Yes.  The truly connected world is about connecting operational technology with information technology (OT and IT convergence) to power real-time analytics and predictive technologies.  It’s about making sense out of the different data sources that arise from the IoT to create new revenues and business models and supercharge the customer experience.

Simple? Not really. The more sensors and machines you have connected (from electrical pumps to cars), the more employees you have, back office systems, cloud services, apps, the more complex it gets. Your data becomes more fragmented than ever.

Our new tagline “Freedom-as-a-Service” is how we envision empowering you to benefit from a truly connected world. What we want is to ensure that you, our partners and clients, have the freedom of choice in your technology going forward.

That means in concrete terms, that we will develop capabilities which will help our customers and partners to stay independent.  Why is that important?

Because we cannot anticipate the future as well as we could in the past. In order to help customers avoid any bottlenecks, we want to give you the capabilities to innovate and develop projects as freely as you want – whenever, wherever and however you want. We want to make sure that, by using our solutions, you can freely choose any infrastructure and service vendor, for example AWS or Microsoft Azure, or Alibaba in China. So for me, Freedom as a Service underlines our strategic focus to ensure you are independent and can manage your future without vendor lock-in.

When we talk about a truly connected world we are talking about integration of IOT devices, cloud services for sure, but also on-premises integration capabilities. That is the truly connected world in the way we define it. And that is the differentiator for us – because we are the only one, the only global independent player, who can really combine these three areas in an efficient way.

That is Freedom as a Service. That is Software AG.