Cesonia - Efficient And Secure Requirements Management
How would you describe your business idea to a potential investor?
Cesonia is a collaboration solution enabling secure, efficient and data-driven cross-company product development. Our solution offers to bridge the gap between different requirements management systems without the storage of any project data on our end and by enabling the coordination of product requirements with partners across company boundaries. Our platform’s initial focus is on industries with extremely high information security requirements and extensive supplier networks, such as automotive & aerospace engineering or mechanical and plant engineering. As a non-cloud platform, Cesonia provides a secure and efficient collaboration opportunity based on a single point of truth and integrated workflows for complete traceability of activities thanks to the use of a blockchain-based, non-manipulatable audit trail.
What problem do you want to solve, what is your goal?
The issue existing in cross-company development projects and especially within requirements management leads to lengthy, manual and non-transparent processes regarding cooperations between an OEM and the supplier. Despite the industry-wide use of the ReqIF standard, which supports the exchange of requirement data in the automotive industry, there is still a great challenge for OEMs and many automotive suppliers. This is mainly due to the heterogenic and fragmented system-infrastructure and the lack of a secure and reliable connection between critical systems across company boundaries. Cesonia as a technology platform solves the aforementioned issues enabling seamless cross-company collaboration and coordination between all stakeholders with a uniform data view and End-to-End Workflow support between all partners.
How did you come up with your idea/concept?
While working within the automotive industry, Korbinian experienced the pain of not having the right information at hand and being unable to collaborate effectively and efficiently with suppliers, Johannes and Daniel obtained their Ph.D. on distributed systems at the LMU Munich. After meeting through mutual friends in 2017, they decided to team up at the beginning of 2018 and solve the problems Korbinian had experienced in his daily work with the technology Johannes and Daniel had researched and conceptualized for during their doctorate. The result was our concept of a fully decentralized solution to support full data sovereignty and control for the data owner.
What is your business model?
Our business model is a B2B Platform as a Service (PaaS). As a cross-company collaboration platform, independent from a specific use case, our subscription fee is based on the combination of the number of users and the number of collaboration partners along-with the application and service it is used in.
Everyone is talking about cloud solutions, why decentralized?
We look at cloud platforms as the perfect solution for intracompany collaboration and data sharing with plenty of advantages such as scalability and lower costs. However, when it comes to collaborating and exchanging highly sensitive data between legally independent parties, the cloud solutions are just not the right fit. By maintaining the data at its source systems, where it has always been, as well as with a decentralized administration, data security, data sovereignty and accessibility of reliable data can be guaranteed. A decentralized solution like Cesonia not just meets the highest information security standards, but also supports resources conservation by avoiding multiple data storage needs.
The automotive industry is currently a tough market, so why automotive?
Even though the automotive industry is currently facing immense challenges, we still see great potential for Cesonia in helping the industry to not only be more efficient but also to cut down on costs, and at the same time improve information security. With Cesonia integrating the ReqIF Standard, which is used to exchange requirements data between companies and systems, as a basis, our Platform supports all the necessary functions in order to establish effective and efficient project management.
Why did you decide to work with XPRENEURS?
As part of UnternehmerTUM XPRENUERS provides a broad network base with plenty of useful industry contacts. Furthermore, by supporting startups with the necessary knowledge about their go-to-market, product-market-fit and sales strategies, XPRNEURS was the perfect platform to set up and validate our business.
You can get more information about Cesonia on their website or follow them on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, XING or Medium.
You want to become part of the XPRENEURS incubator program as well?
Get more information and apply at https://xpreneurs.io/
