I’m Victor Kmita, CEO and founder at XME.digital enterprise application low code platform. For the last 17 years, I have helped corporations all over the world with their digital transformation journey. I’ve started from software engineering, and now I run businesses represented in Canada, the United States, Poland, Cyprus, and Ukraine. Here is how it all has started.
Since I was a kid, I have been interested in getting things done: airplane model kits, home chemistry, electrical stuff, and software. It’s so fascinating when you have a vision and small steps to move towards it. At the same time, building a career at a big corporation and making digital transformation solutions for businesses with 10+ million customers, I was questioning myself what’s next.
I’ve done an MBA program to get a consistent view of how business is running and in 2015 have started my own business with my partners. We are going through rises and falls for six years, and after the last pivot in 2018 we have done the XME.digital low code platform.
The Idea Behind
It’s not so difficult to find an idea for a business; the real challenge is to make it work. That’s why the idea behind the business is so important: to engage the team when you are overwhelmed with stuff happening around you. We focus on giving enterprises and startups all over the world the opportunity to make valuable digital services and products out of ideas twice faster.
See Also: ProofHub – Brand Story by Sandeep Kashyap (CEO and Founder)
How It Has Started
More than fifteen years ago, I boosted my career at one of the largest telecommunication companies in Eastern Europe – lifecell (part of Turkcell group). We were building mobile operator services in a very fast-growing market from scratch. As competition was extremely high, we put a lot of effort into creating some unique digital services and seamless experiences for our customers and digital products for our employees to serve customer needs.
Campaign management, bundle management, CRM, product and service catalog – we were creating a tailor-made Business Support System. While working on this project, we have uncovered that the problem of fast digital services & products building is not resolved; still, it is one of the bottlenecks of digital transformation in the world.
So, together with my colleagues, we have launched our own startup – fast code platform – digital services enabler how we have called in in 2015 XM^ONLINE.
Market Readiness
At the very beginning, we were extremely inspired by the vision of managing all digital services in a single cloud platform and released XM^ONLINE version 1 as a SaaS platform. However, things that sound obvious in 2021 weren’t accepted by many enterprises in 2015. Having high technical readiness to support millions of transactions it was hard to convince corporate customers to entrust their core value-generating processes and sensitive data to the new cloud service provider.
Also, clients just were afraid to invest a lot in some kind of startup. We were targeting the telco market, just like banking & insurance. These guys usually are conservators; they like to be sure of what they get, especially when it comes to business-critical services. However, for startups, it was important to stay independent on their IP rights and product life cycle development process.
That led us to perform a pivot to the brand new version of the platform and tools, making it the core of the platform available as open-source software for startups, with open and flexible data, configuration-based business model, and business logic engine. This has helped us to establish more credibility: an open-source project is not a pig in a poke, like black-boxed SaaS. Showing what is inside has helped us to establish trust.
See Also: Kardia – Brand Story by Christan Hiscock (Co-founder and CEO)
Swiss Knife Is Hard to Sell
For corporations, we released enterprise-specific components to let systems embed into their existing software landscape as a way to foster their digital transformation. We offer to implement microservice-based approaches for service providers’ business automation, including customer management, services delivery, and orchestration.
In the beginning, we were extremely inspired by a new platform that can resolve all possible issues, and we have forgotten to define precise customer cases to show our best. We were pitching with “We can cover it all,” and it worked somehow, but didn’t sound trustworthy. How can a newbie be so qualified?
Clients are like pickled cucumbers – hard to get the first one
From the very beginning, we were aiming for large corporations as clients – we considered our enterprise experience would be relevant. But the bigger company is, the harder decisions are to make, our sales cycle normally lasts from 6 to 12 months.
To show how all this fast code stuff works, we have made a lot of POCs and MVPs with our R&D team just to show how fast we can create new digital services or products. And it has worked better than the demo. We still are working with some clients we have got on this stage.
Narrowing Offer
In 2019 we entered the IoT market with one of our clients. Since 2021 we have been working on XME.digital as a business service for IoT platforms. This idea is to orchestrate thousands of interactive devices, transforming data and actions into insights and new digital services. Our target market is related to intelligent business; it is a next-generation Building Management System.
Today, with 5G spreading worldwide, we help manage private networks and create Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) for private non-telco companies.
This year Gartner has given us something to think about. What Technologies would be emerging in upcoming years? It’s not about tech stack, programming languages we use, SAP or Oracle. All of this is about problems we solve and areas of digital improvement we work on.
To make digital transformation faster, we use Enterprise Low-code platforms. And to be more productive, we automate routines with AI-based tools. To enable digital services, we work with IoT platforms.
Fascinating, isn’t it?
See Also: CMA Exam Academy – Brand Story by Nathan Liao (Founder & CEO)
Mission to Lead the Team
No business can survive without a mission behind it. We truly believe digitization can improve the customer experience and employee experience and well-being.
By using fast & low code platform development, teams worldwide gain an opportunity to launch new ideas faster, validate the hypothesis, make mistakes, and receive outcomes from this experience. It is like a freedom of creation but for engineers.
Every successful entrepreneur has a secret power – support from family or friends. When days are darker than usual I have a secret power course from my loved ones and motivation to move on.
