The Business Spotlight: The section where we look at the companies active in the sectors we cover, tell their stories and introduce their solutions to show you what they’ve got and who they are. Today with…
What can you tell us about your company and your products & services?
eccenca is a leading German company in the field of enterprise knowledge graph technology. We provide solutions for the automated integration of heterogeneous big data from disparate sources. This enables companies to meet their specific needs for smart supply chain, IoT automation and AI application as well as compliance with regulatory challenges like GDPR or BCBS 239. To achieve this we leverage the vision of a business digital twin which digitalizes and links a company’s entire physical, logical and process information landscape. As a result our clients profit from a cross-functional utilization of their formerly siloed data along freely scalable enterprise networks while establishing comprehensive data governance.
How came you up with the idea and what drives you?
Prior to GDPR the world was a lawless place and the rights of privacy and protection thereof were at the level of the wild west. The right of the strongest, the smartest or the most unscrupulous was giving way to any kind of reason and respect. Just recently, I got offered two different prices by a rental car company in the US depending on whether I logged into the website from my iphone or with my PC. While I fully understand the legitimate desire of retailer to implement a yield management strategy, I strongly believe in the value of consumer protection. What if my health insurance company were to give me a different price due to information that they had gathered about me? What if they turned me down? What if I could not get a loan, because the bank found out that I am friends with people who just went bankrupt and some computer now thinks that I might have a propensity to do the same? I am excited about the new capabilities available to process more and more data and I am convinced that there will be wonderful applications and new services that can be built on top of this data. But I am also convinced that data privacy and protection thereof should not only be a fundamental right of the individual, it should be part of the core value proposition of any company. eccenca has set out to help those companies that, while aiming to be profitable and customer-centric, are upholding the rights and the privacy of its business partners as part of their core DNA. We want to help make this world (and the digital world for that matter) a happier and healthier place to live in and we are looking for enterprises to join us in this commitment.
What is it that makes your company different from others?
We understand that the classic concepts of data management, i.e. the closed world assumption of relational databases, can’t meet the requirements of a highly dynamic, heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory data landscape. No matter if talking about GDPR, ePrivacy, smart supply chain, Industry of Things or multi-cloud, companies must be able to integrate, curate and work with data across applications and even entire eco-systems. eccenca provides a lingua franca for data that is completely independent of the data source, format and purpose. And eccenca does this without proposing the next proprietary silo.
Where are you based?
Our headquarters are based in Leipzig, Germany. We also have offices in Berlin, Hannover and Stuttgart and are currently setting up business in France and the United Kingdom.
When was the company launched?
It was launched as a spin-off of German Leipzig University’s Institute for Applied Informatics in 2013 and became a subsidiary of the established IT service developer brox-IT Solutions.
What traction have you made? Can you tells us about your biggest achievements so far?
eccenca has gained traction as a lean solution provider for dealing with the challenges of digital transformation, big data and data protection. We have worked and continue partnerships with Nokia, Volkswagen, Daimler, RFS, Siemens and Bosch, establishing the foundations for complexity management, data as a service, smart supply chain and automated GDPR compliance management. For example, at Bosch we integrated our eccenca GDPR solution to provide full data transparency on all personal data across the hundreds of applications within the enterprise. At RFS we established a global virtual warehouse which let to a significant inventory turn over and decreased the data preparation effort by 50 %.
Lately, Gartner Inc. has acknowledged our achievements in its report “Cool Vendors in Intelligent Supply Chain Execution Technologies” while in 2019 the industry magazine CIOApplications once again listed eccenca as Top 10 GDPR Solution Providers. We are also supporting the Association for Supply Chain Management APICS in establishing a global knowledge graph framework for smart supply chain management.
What advice could you give to other entrepreneurs and startups?
Stay agile. The market and customer demands are moving fast and there is no time to overthink. Get your minimum viable product ready and move from there. Also, find partners who can connect you with potential customers and partners. Build your network.
What can you tell us about your team?
We are a diverse team of 50 people from all over Europe. I love to work with open-minded, dedicated people who really want to shape the future of digital supply-chains, data privacy and knowledge management. Sometimes that means nothing less than rethinking everything. My team meets this challenge every day.
What’s next for your company?
We are a dynamically growing company, hiring new staff every month. This year will see us moving rapidly out of the German boundaries to establish business all over Europe and North America.
How can potential customers and investors get in touch with you?
Hans-Christian Brockmann, CEO of eccenca
Web: www.eccenca.com
Email: hans-christian.brockmann@eccenca.com
Phone: + 49 173 3698610
“The Business Spotlight on…” is the section at PlanetCompliance that looks at the companies active in the sectors we cover, tells their stories and introduces the solutions to give them a platform to show what they’ve got and who they are. If you want to know more about how you can get featured in this section, contact us at launch@planetcompliance.comor on Twitter at @PlanetComplianc