More than just software: get to know the faces behind Germanedge! In our series “How the future is created: Our experts in conversation”, we present exclusive insights from our product management team in interview format.
In this interview, we introduce our Product Manager for the Egde.One platform, Oliver Prudlik. What is his role and task at Germanedge? Where does his passion for innovative solutions come from? Oliver Prudlik also tells you how the Edge.One platform works, what benefits it offers customers and what makes it so special.
No time to watch the video with sound? Then just read the transcript:
Hello, I’m Oliver, Oliver Prudlik. I’m the product manager for the Edge.One platform and I drive development, coordinate development, create visions and compare them with stakeholders. That’s actually my main area of responsibility.
What challenges does the Edge.One platform solve in digital production?
First of all, that we can and want to scale at all, for example, that we can get the whole thing up and running quickly. The entire system is scripted, so you can simply create a new environment at the touch of a button. Then, as I said, the advantage of scaling is that we have many areas that we want to cover technically with different technologies, and we can keep enriching them with certain technologies, with certain modern technologies. We can also choose what we use there, i.e. integration of open source tools.
Which functions in particular lead to success?
Of course, you can now break this down into many areas and go into great detail, because you can really tell from the Inspire Design System alone what the advantages are, also for the customer, that you have an interface that can be adapted to the customer’s needs. You can say that these are the things we want to convey. Whether these are tables or charts. And so on. And it’s, we have several apps that we want to build, but everything looks consistent. Everything has a look and feel. It’s all a consistent operating pat-on, which is what we want to pursue. And we have experts who basically do this for all possible apps or the pat-ons that these apps carry with them, such as checklists. Or we have master-detail relationships, such as drill-downs. And so on. And specialists then work with the projects and the application teams to optimize the UX for the corresponding app, so it’s very, very strongly optimized so that it’s very easy to use and that it’s all from a single source.
What are the benefits of the platform?
With the Application Composer, we have created a tool with which the customer can put together their own user interfaces without much knowledge of coding or any design guidelines. And they can then adapt the apps to their needs relatively quickly.
What applications does AI have on the platform?
But we have two approaches in mind for now. One approach is to assist the customer, to support and help them, possibly in the form of a chatbot. And the other option is, of course, to be able to use the tool yourself, i.e. to provide instructions. What are the use cases that I want to fulfill? What are the requirements, possible customers? Of course, the system keeps learning on its own. In other words, the more apps I have already created with it or the more often I have used the tool, the better the system knows which apps it can create for you. I then simply specify any use cases in a certain area that I want to use and the tool then automatically generates an app and an interface for it.
Is the future with Germanedge on premise or in the cloud?
The Edge.One platform is very flexible, so we can cover both scenarios. On premise and on cloud. Of course, the cloud variant is always preferred. For security reasons alone, you will never be able to set this up independently in an on-premise system that is as secure as doing it in the cloud.
What are the benefits for the customer?
The Edge.One platform is extremely flexible. In principle, you can integrate any use case you have that can be digitized anywhere into the system and use it to build your digital factory and network it with each other. We have an event bus that these individual fragments can use to communicate with each other. As I said, these individual modules can be switched on and off and you can use the services that we have implemented or will implement to permanently expand the system in all possible directions. Whether it’s mobile, whether it’s artificial intelligence, voice control. Anything is conceivable that has a technical interface where data can be exchanged.