This year, on March 1st, TechnologyCatalogue.com marked a significant milestone as it celebrated its 6th anniversary. Recently, we reflected on this milestone together with CEO and Co-founder, Erik Nijveld (Read blog: 6 years of TechnologyCatalogue.com | Interview with Erik Nijveld). Today, we have the pleasure of meeting with the other founder, Vincent van Beusekom. Vincent - as the COO and CTO - is responsible for platform development and operations.
Vincent, congratulations with the 6th company anniversary. A great milestone! Can you say a few words how the platform started back in 2018?
The idea of TechnologyCatalogue.com was inspired by what we used to do in Shell, when we supported assets and projects around the globe with getting the right technologies deployed. We’ve experienced first hand that decision makers are often not aware of available technologies that can address today’s challenges, and often don’t have access to key data to facilitate the decision making.
Like many companies, Shell had their own internal catalogue with an overview of solutions that assets and projects can apply. However, the problem with such an internal catalogue: if it relies on your own people to keep the content up to date, it’s immediately outdated. And when users see 2-3 entries that are no longer up-to-date, they also no longer trust other entries.
The basis of the design of TechnologyCatalogue.com was to create a system whereby the suppliers keep the content up-to-date. And not only giving an overview of the solution itself, but also showing deployment references and reviews. Those references and reviews support the decision making.
The suppliers have a clear incentive to maintain the content, otherwise they miss out on potential clients. And the references and reviews act as checks and balances to keep the suppliers honest, and support the claims they make.
In the end, decision makers are more willing to try a technology if they know that others have successfully used it and support it, like in daily life where we rely on the opinions of people around us before making decisions.
When we launched the platform back in 2018 it was really launched as an MVP and nowhere near to the mature platform that it is today. I’m very proud to see what our team has delivered in the last years to enable both technology end-users and suppliers to get maximum value out of the platform.
Did you consider setting up a platform like TechnologyCatalogue.com within Shell?
Yes, we did. However, with the IT and legal restrictions in large corporates, it would have been essentially impossible. Not to speak about the large number of stakeholders you would have to manage to set up such a platform, and the cost involved, with the very high internal tariffs, or tariffs of consultancy firms.
An important element of TechnologyCatalogue.com is the community of users from different companies around the globe. That is a clear added value compared to having a platform that only consists of users within your own company.
Not to mention any names, but we have seen some corporates who have tried to set up a system like TechnologyCatalogue.com within their company in recent years. And then realising after a couple of years that it doesn’t work, for the reasons just mentioned. I‘m not a big fan of the phrase ‘I told you so’, but in this case it’s true I’m afraid.
Can you say something about the feedback you get from subscribed companies?
My team and I have regular engagements with our customers. A typical response that we get from end-users is: “Why wasn’t there something like TechnologyCatalogue.com before?” It all makes a lot of sense, although I can also say that developing & operationalising a platform like ours is not something that is easy. It takes significant time and effort.
The feedback that we get from suppliers is that it helps them to generate high-quality leads at a cost that is way lower compared to being at exhibitions.
We continuously listen to the feedback of our customers, to make small improvements as well as large ones. Just to mention one element that they regularly feed back to us: end-users as well as suppliers are keen that we also make our platform available to other industries, beyond the energy industry. It helps end-users to leverage the expertise from other industries, and it helps suppliers to create visibility towards customers in other industries.
The move to other industries is something for the future for us, our near-term focus is on the energy industry, which is a huge market in itself. But it’s great that our customers give us this feedback that that’s the direction they would like to see us going.
How do you prioritise the platform development activities?
We listen to the feedback of our customers and respond accordingly. And what also helps is our own experience. Based on our previous roles before starting the company, we understand what is needed.
We are thereby not just another technology scouting firm. With our platform, we support companies with finding, selecting and deploying the right technologies.
A pain point of many companies is the very low ratio between technologies that eventually get deployed versus scouted. We streamline that process, such that the right tech are selected and deployed, this way saving a lot of money and accelerating the uptake of technology.
Do you see AI as a threat?
We actually see it as an opportunity. With AI, we can rapidly increase the content on our platform, as well as support our users to extract maximum value from our platform.
There are a couple of things that we offer to our customers that AI tools on the market don’t have. First of all, our platform comes with a large user community of currently over 10,000 people. Secondly, the data insights that we provide to our end-users are typically not publicly available data, hence not accessible to AI tools such as ChatGPT. Finally, users want to get information about technology in a structured format. When you are searching for a hotel, people go to sites such as booking.com, such that you can easily find & select the right hotel with information presented to you in a consistent format. The same goes for searching for technologies.
That was all for today’s interview.
If you would like to learn more about the platform, please book a demo by going to: book a no-commitment demo
If you wish to have a discussion with Vincent directly, please contact him by sending a message to: vincentvanbeusekom@technologycatalogue.com