Never give up. The sky is the limit.

01Who I am

Every life counts. Not 999 out of 1,000.

Before I built software, I learned two professions in which there is no such thing as 99.9 %: airline pilot with Austrian Airlines and air traffic controller with Austro Control. The entrance tests for both are among the toughest in the world – the DLR test in Hamburg with a failure rate north of 98 %, the multi-day assessment at Austro Control in which people find out how resilient they really are. Tens of thousands apply, a few dozen get through. I passed both.

IQ measures how fast someone thinks. The cockpit test measures how calm someone stays when the display at the top right has been showing something wrong for five seconds and you have to be the first to notice. In aviation, the second one counts. And above everything stands one principle: every life counts. Not 999 out of 1,000. All of them.

A professional pose or an operating system? When I took up tennis again in autumn 2025 after a thirty-year break, I looked for a coach who had worked with ATP top-10 players for decades. Not because I want to go on tour – but because when I take something seriously, I want to know where my ceiling really is.

02The craft

Explaining is half the work.

After the cockpit came SAP – and with SAP a habit that has stayed with me ever since: thinking a thing through until you can explain it in simple sentences. Over the years that turned into sixteen books with SAP PRESS, in German and in English, most of them written at night and at weekends.

At some point SAP accepted me into the circle of SAP Champions; there are fewer than a hundred worldwide. And participants in my SAP trainings have given me ratings that put me among the best-rated SAP trainers worldwide. I rarely mention it. It says less about me than about the people who reflected every unclear slide straight back at me.

What remains is an attitude: whoever has truly understood something can explain it. And whoever can explain it can build it. That is why CloudDNA’s motto today is simply: “Wir bauen das.” – We build it.

03At home

Three children, one father, no autopilot.

I am a single father of three children. The two younger ones are of school age, the eldest is an adult. Anyone who knows this knows: there is no roster that holds and no day that ends the way it was planned. You learn to set priorities in seconds – and to re-sort them the next morning.

My eldest son is severely disabled. He lives with a rare genetic defect, a microdeletion. He has taught me more about patience, reliability and what really matters than any assessment and any project.

My three children are the centre of my life and my motivation – every single day.

When I say “every life counts”, it is no longer a phrase from the cockpit. It is everyday life. And it is the reason I build software that gives people time back – time that is needed more urgently elsewhere.

My life has changed massively through all of this. I have become even more structured than I was used to from the cockpit – and that is exactly why, in the early morning hours before the house wakes up, there is room every day for an hour of sport: kettlebell, rope skipping, boxing. Not despite the responsibility, but because of it.

I am convinced: what matters most is the daily routine.

Big goals are not reached with big days, but with many ordinary ones that reliably start the same way. That is exactly how we build software: it should carry the daily routine – unspectacular, reliable, every day – so that head and time remain for the unplannable.

Never give up.
The sky is the limit.

My motto. Not a poster on the wall – a decision, every morning.

04One sentence in Hamburg

How KSIC became CloudDNA.

I founded CloudDNA more than ten years ago – originally not under that name. I came from SAP, where I had spent years at one of the largest software companies in the world. A safe harbour. I left it anyway.

It started with an unwieldy name: KSIC GmbH – Koch Security, Integration and Cloud Consulting. Four letters nobody could pronounce. Rescue came over dinner in Blankenese, Hamburg, at a fish restaurant on the Elbe. My old SAP colleague Jörg listened to my explanation for the third time, raised his glass and said a single sentence:

“Martin, you have the cloud in your DNA.”

Two weeks later KSIC GmbH was no longer called KSIC. Daniel, my first employee, was already there – on his very first business trip. (Daniel, I am still sorry about the turbot.)

We started in a tiny office in Oberwart. Today we work in the former Raiffeisen bank in Loipersdorf, in the middle of the spa and wine region of southern Burgenland, and draw on two talent schools you will not find on any world map: HTL Pinkafeld and the University of Applied Sciences Burgenland. The duo has become a team of 24 people, and we have published eighteen books with SAP PRESS – always from practice, never from marketing.

05The upheaval

Custom software was a red rag. Until 2023.

I built CloudDNA to create SAP integrations for large corporations – heavy software, paced in months. In that world custom software was avoided like the plague: too expensive, too slow, too risky.

Then came the language models.

I realised: this is not a gradual improvement, it is the upheaval that rewrites our craft. So I sat down myself and built software – at night, in my own editor, with the same tools I recommend to my team. You cannot explain AI-assisted development to anyone with a PowerPoint. You have to live it.

What used to take three months and a six-figure sum now takes weeks. Not because programmers work magic, but because copilots take over the drudgery and developers become what they should be: craftspeople with a head.

06We build it

From “We deliver” to “Wir bauen das”.

For more than ten years our promise was “We deliver”: a customer describes, we deliver. That made us big. But it has a limit: whoever only delivers what is ordered rarely builds what is needed.

That is why we are rebuilding ourselves. Consultants and developers are becoming forward deployed engineers and product owners. Forward deployed means: they sit where the problem arises – in the property management office, at the winery, in the law firm – and build on site. Product owner means: they stay until it is solved and own the product, not the ticket.

“Wir bauen das.” CloudDNA’s new motto – three words you may only say to a customer if you mean them.

07We speak AI

Inside the AI bubble and, above all, outside it.

Inside the AI bubble everyone talks about models, benchmarks and agents. Outside – with the property manager running a thousand units, the winemaker in southern Burgenland, the restaurateur with twenty tables – a different question counts: Will this save me an hour tomorrow, and can I rely on it?

We translate between these worlds. We build with Claude by Anthropic every day and are well on our way to becoming an Anthropic partner. But what reaches the customer is not a model, it is a workflow that works:

• The AI proposes, a human decides. More autonomy comes only after a passed probation period.
• Every action is in the audit trail. What the AI did can be read back.
• AI has to pay for itself. Own key, fixed cost cap per tenant.
• Data stays where it belongs. Tenants separated down to the database.

Anthropic and Claude are trademarks of Anthropic PBC. The mention describes how we work.

08The Tailor family

Made to measure instead of standard with a hundred compromises.

Instead of just talking about AI-assisted development, we picked industries I know well enough – or in which I have friends who explain the problem to me until it sticks. Every Tailor shares the same foundation with its siblings, but speaks the language of its industry:

• TailorCampus – for leaders and teams who want to understand AI before they use it – born because a friend asked for an AI workshop for his group.
• ImmoTailor – for property managers and developers, because accounting, maintenance and portals get in each other’s way there more than anywhere.
• JournalTailor – for accounts payable before SAP, BMD and DATEV, because in SAP projects I have too often watched invoices being retyped although the posting behind them has long been routine.
• DocumentTailor – for SAP shops, because I spent fifteen years building forms on SAP Adobe Document Services and did not want to leave the succession question unanswered any longer.
• RecordTailor – for everyone who needs a DMS that does not just store but reads – because I have too often seen someone secretly open Excel because the DMS is too slow.
• TaxTailor – for tax firms, because a friend told me about his Windows terminal server over a glass of wine.
• DineTailor – for restaurants, because for years I have been sitting at other people’s tables selling champagne to restaurateurs.
• StayTailor – for hotels, because the spa region is full of businesses ducking under the booking portals’ terms.
• MeetingTailor – for meetings and boards, because foundation boards, councils and club committees among my friends keep describing the same late-night scene.
• Weintailor – for winemakers, because we sit in the middle of a wine region and every other trip turns into a wine trip anyway.
• BuildTailor – for construction and trades, because defects, plans and daily reports happen on site – not in the office.
• AcademyTailor – for universities and corporate academies that run on SAP – because in many years as an SAP trainer I have watched training, exams and certificates fall apart between Excel lists and SAP GUI transactions. And because institutions running SAP Student Lifecycle Management need an answer to what comes after SAP ERP 6.0.

CloudDNA is therefore no longer just an SAP supplier, but a workshop with a growing product line. Bolder in business. Humanly the most honest thing we could do.

09Why AcademyTailor

Every person counts. Not the file in the cabinet. All of them.

I taught SAP for many years. In every course sat people who wanted to learn something and hold something in their hands at the end – a certificate, a credential, the next step. And behind every course stood an organisation that had to manage it all: registrations, places, exams, certificates. Often in spreadsheets, often in inboxes, often in transactions only two people in the building really understood.

In aviation they say “every life counts”. On campus that means: what counts is not the file in the cabinet, but the person behind it. Six thoughts from which AcademyTailor was born:

1. Thought 1 · The classroom

   Whoever learns wants something in their hands at the end.

   A credential nobody can verify is a piece of paper. That is why AcademyTailor signs credentials and gives them a public verification address – so employers, universities and authorities do not have to call.

2. Thought 2 · The registry

   “Prerequisite missing” is not an answer.

   Whoever turns down a booking should give every reason at once – and, if it is only full, offer a place on the waitlist. Seven checks at once are not a technical gimmick, but respect for students’ time.

3. Thought 3 · The core

   A clean core is a quiet core.

   I have seen too many SAP systems whose upgrade hinged on modifications. AcademyTailor runs beside them, on SAP BTP, and talks to S/4HANA through interfaces. Your Basis team will thank you.

4. Thought 4 · The rule

   The AI prepares. People decide.

   This rule applies in every Tailor. At AcademyTailor it means: early warning gives its reasons, the briefing is written even without AI, and a person always decides on a grade or an admission.

5. Thought 5 · The flywheel

   A degree is the start of the next turn.

   Whoever earns a certificate today books the refresher tomorrow. Whoever graduates today comes back as alumni tomorrow. That is why our lifecycle is not a line but a wheel.

6. Thought 6 · The ambition

   The sky is the limit.

   We want to become number one – for SAP customers all over the world. That is a goal, not a claim. What you can measure us by.