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A SaaS Marketplace for Digital Collaboration: CAMPfire
At the global media, services, and education company Bertelsmann, several divisions are doing innovative work on new software. The Group's technology strategists have partnered with Deloitte to launch a platform project. Thanks to the new Software-as-a-Service Marketplace, any developments on the Bertelsmann Collaboration Platform (BCP) can now be shared and scaled internationally within the Group.
In the digital era, new technologies constantly emerge, and global media groups such as Bertelsmann become ever more digital. Amongst many others, its innovations include an application that automatically reformats video content using artificial intelligence (AI), an address verification software, a sentiment analysis tool, and AI that automatically recognizes celebrities in images. However, due to several hurdles, other Group subsidies have been largely unable to use such in-house developments. Bertelsmann has thus been looking to make its in-house platform, Bertelsmann Collaboration Platform (BCP), fit for the future of tech sharing.
Deloitte CAMPfire has delivered what they were looking for. The platform’s user interface can be individually adapted to each company and hosted by different cloud providers, enabling smooth and legally compliant provisioning, sharing, pricing, and billing of digital assets. The platform is fully effective across all areas and markets, and drives enterprise-wide software innovation.
Bertelsmann Senior Vice President Technology and Data Rhys Nölke explains the starting point and goal: "Group-wide cooperation is the goal of our Bertelsmann-wide Tech and Data Alliance. As innovation cycles become increasingly fast-paced, we want to combine know-how and technology exchange on one digital platform. To this end, we have built the Bertelsmann Collaboration Platform over the past two years. Almost 4,000 colleagues are now united on the platform. But especially in software development and co-development, our business units lacked a marketplace to exchange solutions professionally and independently via APIs, apps and tools. Our approach: Better to exchange solutions and reuse them than to reinvent the wheel every time." BCP already provided a basis for sharing APIs, but still lacked crucial functions such as asset pricing, consumption tracking, onboarding, container hosting, and documentation of assets.
This is exactly where Deloitte was able to help.
Together with Deloitte, we were able to draw on extensive experience in dealing with intra-group technology. Similar to our Bertelsmann Collaboration Platform, CAMPfire has been developed to be very practice-oriented, so it took little convincing to combine the CAMPfire and BCP approaches for intra-group exchange.
Rhys Nölke, Bertelsmann Senior Vice President Technology & Data
Dr. Jan-Niklas Keltsch, Director at Deloitte and Lead at deloitte.ai and CAMPfire: "CAMPfire is Deloitte’s solution for sharing apps in Deloitte's global network, the deloitte.ai Marketplace. This solution will now also be made available to Deloitte partners and clients." After examining possible alternatives, Bertelsmann concluded that the platform was more efficient than expanding in-house development. Working with Deloitte, CAMPfire has been adapted and tested in a proof of concept (POC).
Fittingly, the new marketplace on the Bertelsmann Collaboration Platform was also developed in a spirit of open cooperation among partners. Deloitte's interdisciplinary expertise was key to identifying critical aspects such as transfer pricing and development of suitable solutions. Both sides formed expert teams from business and technology, as well as from tax, legal and cyber, and the first steps of the project have now been successfully completed: In about four months for each, a feasibility study was carried out in workshops and then the proof of concept was developed, including onboarding of the first APIs. After extensive testing, the CAMPfire SaaS Marketplace was fully implemented. Crucial to Bertelsmann were the three dimensions of the solution: time to market, total cost of ownership, and functionality.
This is a good starting point, as Rhys Nölke explains: "Collaboration is a major challenge for companies such as Bertelsmann, whose history dates back to 1835. Our goal is to become a leading user of AI/ML, and of cloud and data technologies. We want to use our diverse competencies and knowledge within the Group and, with BCP, we have laid the foundation for a network of experts and technology exchange."
The new CAMPfire SaaS Marketplace helps the Group create the necessary conditions. CAMPfire stands for "Corporate Application Management Platform", but the name is of course also meant in a figurative sense. Dr. Jan-Niklas Keltsch: "The campfire is the central meeting point in a camp where everyone comes together and exchanges ideas. But it also keeps unwanted intruders away – in IT terminology, 'intruders and bugs'. This is key to the SaaS marketplace: malware and hackers are fended off." The centralized structure facilitates effective implementation of the highest cyber and security standards.
However, this is not a fundamentally closed system. In principle, the SaaS marketplace can also be opened to external actors, thereby reinforcing the platform effect and growing the ecosystem. For the two partners Bertelsmann and Deloitte, the next step is to light the digital bonfire for internal collaboration throughout the Group – and to attract as much Bertelsmann talent as possible from all over the world to share software via the new SaaS marketplace.
Real connections. Real impact.
We will soon see companies networking with each other and perhaps share their digital assets not only internally, but in meta-marketplaces across company boundaries as well.
Dr. Jan-Niklas Keltsch, Director at Deloitte and Lead deloitte.ai and CAMPfire
