Shifting Gears: With its Cutting-edge SaaS Platform, Panaya Helps Businesses Rapidly Innovate and Evolve

The Silicon Review

“The main motivation for Panaya is to help all those business IT leaders, move faster with innovation, without worrying about breaking something in production.”

Our business world is now fast-paced, and as organizations, our competitiveness is measured by our ability to adapt to change. How does change management help organizations become more competitive? It’s a strategic approach to easing organizational transition. It can help professionals to understand, accept, commit to, and embrace the changes in their business environment. For an organization, change can occur in many ways -- leadership, technological, or strategic changes. By now, organizations have come to realize the important role of change management in the implementation of new technologies.

Various companies are specialized in providing change management services, but one that stands out from the rest is Panaya. The leader in ERP and CRM change intelligence. The company’s SaaS solutions for change intelligence reduce the time, cost, and risks involved in the delivery of change to business applications like SAP^®, Oracle^® EBS, and Salesforce.com. Powered by cutting-edge data aggregation and machine learning algorithms, Panaya delivers deep insights that help organizations determine dependencies, accelerate testing, and ensure business continuity.

The company was founded in 2006 and acquired by Infosys in 2015. It is headquartered in Israel with offices in US, Germany, UK, France and Japan.

In Conversation with David Binny, CEO of Panaya

Q. What motivated you to address the challenges faced in change management and change acceleration?

Panaya specializes in the ERP and CRM domains and is focused on three main markets: SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce. For these three vendors, if you upgrade your CRM or make changes to your ERP business processes, a constant concern is, what might go wrong. This is because a business application system in production connects hundreds or maybe even thousands of business users and processes millions of invoices or transactions daily. What Panaya does in a nutshell is removing the risk element out of any change you are trying to implement.

When we sell our SaaS solutions to many large IT organizations and enterprises, we notice that these organizations want to change, but they are concerned. This is because they do not know what exactly will break or how smooth will be the move to production. To avoid risk, they are taking a lot of buffers and manual work to understand exactly where the impact is going to be. For this reason, a good number of our clients are holding back or restraining innovation, and they are not running changes that are required by the business. The main motivation for Panaya is to help all those business leaders or owners of the ERP and CRM landscapes in IT organizations, move faster and innovate safer without worrying about breaking something in production. The main motivation behind our solution is to allow our customers to never compromise on the speed of releasing new features, and of course on the quality of their releases.

Q. How do you manage to understand the company and its operation before you start strategizing an acceleration plan?

As a part of our sales motion, we run a discovery process with the prospect, which then becomes a customer. This is to understand the software changes that are running in the organization. We learn more about the organization by conducting this discovery session with the customer. Secondly, we can take a snapshot of their system to understand their activities over the last year. We use machine learning and our own algorithms to take this short extraction, and then we sit together with the prospect to show them a live demonstration of the impact to their business. We show them the change requests that they have had in the last quarter or year. We show them all the releases that moved to production and how business processes were affected. After gaining some confidence, they understand that Panaya can map and provide insights into how they work, and how to work more efficiently. This gives them the confidence to move forward with us.

Q. Internal inefficiency can undermine the organization’s operations. Do you help your clients patch their inefficiencies?

Yes, absolutely. One of the inefficiencies that we commonly find is that most of the changes that were made in the past – the customizations in the organization – are not well-documented. The inefficiency here, is that when you want to touch a business process or implement a new change request, you do not know exactly what was done previously because it was poorly documented. Therefore, I would say, there are a lot of built-in inefficiencies that seem almost unavoidable in the process. However, with Panaya, they can easily be avoided. We open our clients’ eyes to the reality of what’s in there, and the customizations they have made. We let them know the inefficiencies of their customizations. For example, consider the risk scenario that the CFO of an organization developed a specific dashboard in the SAP GUI but no one is really using this dashboard, and now, someone needs to attach a business process that affects this dashboard and so the organization assigns testers to test impact, which is of course, a waste of time and resources. Alternatively, you want to know that an existing dashboard is tied to a new process you are invoking. So that potentially you will not show incorrect data. This is a good example of how Panaya can help bridge those internal inefficiencies. Besides, once you decide to implement a change, you need to write a test script for the change that you are going to implement. We also find a lot of inefficiencies in organizations’ inability to repurpose tests. That said, Panaya automatically directs you to the right repository, (all your test libraries can be uploaded to our cloud) and suggests the right tests for the change you’re implementing.

Q. Do you have any new products coming up?

Specifically now, we are working on couple of big epics to be announced in our next release. For SAP - The Automatic Code Corrections for SAP S/4HANA. In a nutshell, once we find an impact in one of the customizations, we can change and update the code automatically! This will be an amazing time saver for our customers. For Oracle – we are releasing a new version of impact analysis simulation to support the latest Oracle Enterprise Business Suite (EBS) version, and for Salesforce.com - we are releasing a full free trial version of our solution, including seamless integrations with third-party tools like JIRA

As a SaaS company, we are constantly innovating and ensuring that all our clients get the latest update every four weeks Plus, we make sure that our clients are adopting the new features by measuring on-going usage.

Meet the leader behind the success of Panaya

David Binny is the Chief Executive Officer of Panaya, a change intelligence and testing solution for SAP ERP, Oracle ERP and Salesforce CRM.

David also serves on the company’s board of Directors. As CEO, David is overseeing the company’s growing sales, alliances, corporate development, marketing, and business operations.

David is passionate about driving relentless innovation and quality, and personally committed to the business success of all Panaya customers.

Motto in life: “Win in your mind and you will win in your reality”.