In this Celosphere 2023 Interview, Acceleration Economy’s Tom Smith and Laura Gardner, Director of Global Partnerships, Celonis, chat with Oliver Zeller, co-founder and CEO, Symbio, while on location in Munich, Germany. They discuss use cases of Sybmio’s offerings as well as insights into new opportunities after being acquired by Celonis.
Highlights
Eighteen years ago, Zeller co-founded a company that started in professional services. He credits this beginning to helping the company understand the customer side, leading to the development of Symbio. Now, Sybmio is a business process management software that allows customers to have a digital twin of their company.
Use Cases (02:00)
The biggest use case is as a quality management system. Symbio brings together where companies can manage guidelines, processes, and information. “It’s very important to get the employees into it,” Zeller recommends.
“That’s the new work compliance; all the rules and guidelines to get to the end user, to the employees, to each individual,” he says. It’s also growing a market of regulation and compliance, helping people “do the right work in the right situations.”
Another use case is transformation. It can be useful in improving and creating your new business world, such as determining the direction your organization should go. Additionally, it can used for onboarding people and getting them into the new system.
A third use case is business excellence. This involves improving each individual and every team. The end-to-end platform enables them to work together.
Symbio is in a wide variety of industries and acknowledges that some industries are more regulated and are under more pressure from the market.
Symbio and Celonis Collaboration (06:37)
Prior to the acquisition, Sybmio and Celonis already had mutual customers who would inquire about combining their offerings, so they had already started working together years ago. There was clearly major interest from their customers to get the tools to work even closer together.
There are many customer benefits from Sybmio and Celonis, as they can get more out of the end-to-end perspectives as well as gain new complete use cases. This enables users to recognize more potential with a wider view.
Opening doors to more opportunities, this acquisition provides Celonis and Sybmio with more competitive positioning. “Celonis is the market leader, the best process intelligence platform in the world — and we can say Symbio is the most innovative platform in the world,” Zeller emphasizes. The combination of these two companies is system agnostic; it’s not in one space. “Customers can do more with us and integrate our technology” into other platforms, too.
Symbio and AI (14:22)
“Our dream and our vision is that we need this technology for each individual as a process copilot, where people can go in and get guidance and get actions with it,” Zeller says.
Symbio is in the Microsoft space and is already working with AI to generate process models to create content and have a copilot for each business analyst in the market. Zeller notes that working with generative AI speeds up business transformation.
The company already integrated a generative AI chat in its employee experience portal to ask questions about information coming in from the customer side. “If you see the technology, how it works, and how it helps all the individuals in an enterprise to ask questions” you can recognize how it’s “really amazing,” as Zeller describes it.
