How GuideVision started

Pavel Müller and I first met on a project in 2004. Pavel worked as a freelance software architect, and I managed a Czech IT team for a German company. On a personal level, we hit it off immediately, so along with a group of friendly developers, we decided to start our own company focused on developing software in Java. But around 2009, we felt that conditions had changed to our detriment — the market was slowly becoming saturated, prices were going down, developers’ pay was going up, and our margins were getting smaller and smaller. We knew we had to start looking for products with a higher added value for the customer, ones with the possibility of establishing closer and longer-term cooperation, increasing our margins and thus ensuring increased long-term sustainability for the company.

We were constantly looking both for services and product development. We were trying to find the Holy Grail. At the time, by the way, we had spent nearly all of the profits we had made so far on developing our own unsuccessful product. Eventually, we came across the ServiceNow platform.

I remember that one day Pavel came back into the office from a meeting with a big customer of ours in the transport sector, and he was talking about an excellent platform they had just decided to buy. We started to research it in detail, studied everything around IT service management products, and we looked at all their regional partners as well as the competitor solutions available. And we liked what we found. ServiceNow was a great product both in its business potential and its technical excellence. Even then it was generations ahead of its competitors, and at the same time, it was essentially unknown in Central and Eastern Europe.

What attracted us much more was the possibility to use ServiceNow to change our role from that of a software supplier to that of a consultancy with closer ties to the customer, as well as the ability to provide their business with much higher added value thanks to our product. And that’s why we finally decided to invest in this opportunity. Today we’ve gone even further in our connections with our customers, and we’re gradually moving from being consultants to being strategic partners.

Stay tuned! In the next part, we will say more about the values of GuideVision.