Heine Krog Iversen is the Founder and CEO of TimeXtender. TimeXtender was founded in 2006 with headquarters in Aarhus, Denmark. Since then, they’ve added a second headquarters in North America, located in Bellevue, Washington and several new regional offices around the world. Over the years, they’ve worked diligently to build a global network of channel partners and more than 3,000 customers across 70+ countries on six continents. Their customers include companies from Fortune 500 and large enterprises to mid-sized organizations.
Heine said: “TimeXtender enables businesses to make superior business decisions significantly faster by using our technology platform and primary solution offering Discovery Hub®. We inspire quality business decisions with data, mind and heart and we do this for one simple reason: because time matters.” In this feature, we discuss TimeXtender with Heine and what makes him a true Game Changer impacting the industry.
This section is called ‘Game Changers.’ What can you share with us that you see as your professional mission to help improve the industry?
My professional mission is to empower every person in every organization with instant access to data to enable them to achieve more by making strategic business decisions for their company. Data is the most valuable currency a company possesses, but only when appropriate stakeholders have access to it as needed and only if it’s truly accurate.
With that in mind, here’s where some fall short when using data: business decisions cannot be made by data alone. While data provides historical context, it should be combined with other factors such as strategy, industry trends, environmental factors, and ‘hunch.’ When you consider all of these factors combined, organizations can then, and only then, make strong business decisions to improve their company and their bottom line.
What first inspired the concept of TimeXtender?
Before launching TimeXtender, I co-founded another IT consultancy that provided business process optimization, workflow, ERP systems and business intelligence services. While helping companies implement business intelligence capabilities on top of their existing ERP systems, I realized that manual coding was needed for all projects. Manual coding was very time-consuming and expensive, and I came to realize that there was a better way by leveraging automation. This led us to start TimeXtender.
At first, we partnered with various ERP consultancies, but these alliances were not suitable for the direction we were headed with automation. Given this, we shifted to companies such as Microsoft, Qlik, and Tableau as they all aligned better with our strategies and with what our customers were looking for from us. These alliances strengthened our mission and enabled us to better provide companies with the benefits derived from automation.
How did you transform TimeXtender from startup to the fast-growing software company it is today?
I’m very proud of the fact that TimeXtender has been recognized in several reports and by various media and analyst groups as one of the fastest-growing, private software companies in the world. This is a true testament to the hard work and dedication put forth by our staff and partners, as well a validation of Discovery Hub®.
Our channel partners are able to support customers directly in their respective regions in all parts of the world. Along with having global business partners, we also offer user groups, seminars, workshops, technical support and customer service to our large and ever-growing customer base. This unrelenting commitment to our customers’ success has helped us become what we are today.
Tell us about Discovery Hub® and why a company should consider your technology platform.
TimeXtender’s Discovery Hub® is a high-performance data management platform that provides capabilities and automation for data access, modelling, and compliance to help companies create a modern, future-proof data estate. This is accomplished by moving from a patchwork of disparate data management tools to a single, integrated platform, thereby eliminating long development cycles and accelerating time to data insights by up to 10 times. This delivers a faster transformation for organizations seeking to become a data-driven business. Its design capabilities empower customers with instant access to data, allowing them to make faster and better business decisions.
Discovery Hub® provides organizations with the capability to connect to most data sources and to catalog, model, move, and document data for analytics and AI, and then use the data visualization or AI tool of their choice to deliver insights. This results in the full power of business intelligence in a structured, governed and secured environment, establishing self-service for users to get actionable insights in less time, while simplifying their compliance journey.
We inspire quality business decisions with data, mind and heart and we do this for one simple reason: because time matters.
You mention accelerating time to data insights. Can you tell us more about how this is accomplished?
It’s all about our technology and how its functionality provides speed. Discovery Hub® automation generates required code so that data infrastructure builders can focus on data quality and business requirements. By using Discovery Hub®, companies can avoid building custom datasets for each request. A new data source for analytics can be added in as little as one day. An intelligent, AI-driven execution engine optimizes the performance of data movement and gathers data in raw form and structure for use in advanced analytics and AI. The bottom line is that companies deploying Discovery Hub® will have a modern data estate that is advanced yet easy to use, enriched, consolidated and prepared for the future—saving significant time and money across the corporate enterprise.
Tell us about your relationships with Microsoft and companies in the analytics business.
TimeXtender’s Discovery Hub® is compatible with Microsoft technologies. We support data deployments on Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, Azure Data Lake, Azure Analysis Services, and SQL Server.
TimeXtender is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Microsoft Azure Certified, and available in the Azure Marketplace. Discovery Hub® was built with a cloud-first mindset, but it’s also available on-premises or hybrid. We support changing deployment models without changing data models as our technology is built to evolve with future technology advancements and new Microsoft Azure offerings.
In addition, Discovery Hub® is compatible with any type of front-end visualization and analytics tool that a business would like to use. We have long-term, existing relationships in place with Microsoft for Power BI, Qlik, and Tableau.
What would be your best piece of advice for executives managing their company’s data estate or business intelligence?
You want to make sure that you have a modern data estate that integrates and consolidates all of your data into a central hub to ensure that your company is relying on ‘one version of the truth.’ To do so, it’s important to take advantage of modern technology and we believe the answer is Discovery Hub®. Traditionally, companies have relied on manual coding which consists of multiple repetitive tasks. And, they’ve often relied on a team of consultants to help them build their data platforms. These efforts are very time consuming and expensive.
This is where the power of automation pays dividends. Customers typically experience a 70% reduction in build costs and 80% reduction in maintenance costs by using Discovery Hub®. They are able to accelerate their time to data insights by up to 10 times. They can significantly reduce costs by eliminating maintenance fees that they are paying for to use a variety of data management tools. And, they can free up IT resources to work on more strategic and more valuable projects that IT should be allocating their time doing.
By using Discovery Hub®, businesses can free up significant time and energy throughout their organization, allowing them to dedicate their workforce to greater innovation, purposeful growth and game-changing breakthroughs. And even more, Discovery Hub® is built with a cloud-first mindset, so that companies can take advantage of all the benefits that come with a cloud deployment on Azure.
While data provides historical context, it should be combined with other factors such as strategy, industry trends, environmental factors, and ‘hunch.’
We hear a lot about compliance these days. How does Discovery Hub® help manage a company’s compliance requirements?
Discovery Hub® helps companies document their analytics data for compliance. Our technology auto-generates complete documentation for a company’s analytics’ data and auto-generates data lineage information. It identifies and catalogs sensitive data, and maintains and manages document access rights for appropriate personnel for access to the right data. Discovery Hub® supports compliance requirements for GDPR, HIPAA, and Sarbanes Oxley.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Website: www.timextender.com
Facebook: @timextender
Twitter: @TimeXtender
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/timextender
TimeXtender HQ – Denmark
Bredskifte Allé 13
DK-8210 Aarhus V
Denmark
Phone: +45 8620 5700
E-mail: info@timextender.com
TimeXtender HQ – USA
411 108th Avenue NE, Suite 700
Bellevue
WA 98004
USA
Phone: +1 877 572 3477
E-mail: txnasales@timextender.com