IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview: Sagi Eliyahu, Tonkean, on providing IT with an Alternative to Apps

By Sagi Eliyahu, CEO and Co-Founder, Tonkean

In this interview, we sat down with Sagi Eliyahu, co-founder and CEO of Tonkean, which just announced the latest release of its no-code process orchestration platform. We talked with Sagi about how Tonkean is looking to create a new enterprise model for rapid, cross-functional solution delivery that also creates a structure to ensure enterprise-wide security & compliance.

• Q: Thanks for speaking with us Sagi. Tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind what you’re bringing to market this week with Tonkean’s latest updates.

A: Sure. So, we have described Tonkean as the “operating system for business operations.” It is a no-code platform that allows enterprises to rapidly deliver solutions for complex business processes. It does so by giving non-developers, typically business operations teams, the ability to create and deliver software solutions on their own.

However, business empowerment cannot be achieved without IT support. This is true not only because IT needs to ensure compliance and security across the organization, but also because IT still needs to be there to overcome the technical challenges business teams inevitably face when deploying complex business technology. Today, IT teams don’t have a viable option to enable both business agility and IT compliance, because they must either rely on building apps themselves, which often take months, or supporting business teams in buying specific apps on their own, which lead to additional compliance risks.

So, with this launch we’re providing the alternative that IT has been looking for to allow them to be better business partners while controlling their risk with compliance and security. In short, we are enabling IT to build an enterprise model that works flexibly with their existing technology stack, componentizes capabilities into reusable building blocks, and allows business self-service without code to orchestrate end-to-end business processes.

• Q: You’ve talked a lot about the composable enterprise with this launch. Why is that so important to your vision for Tonkean?

Yes, this is part of a big bet we’re making on what Gartner describes as the composable enterprise. A composable enterprise is an enterprise who is “able to deliver innovation quickly and adapt applications dynamically — reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise.” This is the future of where enterprise applications are going; more flexible, integrated, and accessible, and in turn providing much more adaptability and agility for businesses.

Tonkean isn’t the only company enabling the composable enterprise, but we’re about to be the first to offer a method that not only has the blessing of IT and BizTech teams but also can work with any of the existing technologies already deployed in a typical enterprise. One way to think about it is that we are providing a low-code solution for IT, with a no-code option for business teams. This helps to balance business agility & enterprise governance by giving IT a componentized way to refine, reuse, and govern business process solutions for any team, process, or technology. With this launch, we allow enterprises to build a new business logic modeling layer that provides more flexibility to build solutions for complex processes without adding new apps or requiring heavy development. It’s very much in line with the idea of the composable enterprise and also helps us get closer to our vision of enabling organizations to build a true operating system for business operations.

• Q: What can we expect to see differently from Tonkean as you provide this bridge between IT and business teams?

First, our users will see our new “Enterprise Components” tool suite. Enterprise Components will empower your IT team to deliver reusable building blocks, which the business can then use to compose their own custom workflows. These building blocks can facilitate integrations to 1000+ enterprise systems, extend custom applications, process unstructured data, facilitate people coordination and more. This will go a long way toward creating a consistent standard that aligns, extends, and governs how business processes can be orchestrated.

They’ll also see our newly revamped “Solutions Studio”, where we’ve remade our process builder as a business logic modeling layer for building complex, cross-functional processes. This provides all the structure for these business teams to quickly create and deliver robust solutions.

• Q: No-code products aren’t usually seen as a fit for the enterprise. Why are you targeting that market, and do you see no-code as a stronger fit now for enterprise-grade business problems?

Not all no-code tooling is equipped for enterprise needs. If a tool is automating tasks without IT involved at all, or helps IT but isn’t accessible by the business teams, it’s unlikely they’ll be effective in enterprises at any scale.

But one of the reasons we’re excited about where Tonkean is heading is that we believe no-code can be an absolute game-changer for enterprises when properly executed. The promise of no-code is the way it can outsource creation to the business, while allowing IT to act more as enablers, as opposed to implementers. The ability to deliver innovation quickly, by reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise, is a perfect fit for no-code development, and we see this as a very powerful new option for democratizing how software is built.

About the Author

Sagi Eliyahu is the CEO and co-founder of Tonkean, the operating system for business operations. Sagi and co-founder Offir Talmor founded Tonkean in 2015 to bridge the “last mile” gap in operations. Prior to Tonkean, Sagi held executive engineering roles at Jive Software. Sagi served for four years in Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Force’s elite intelligence agency, and he applies much of what he learned from developing data and information systems for the agency to his work at Tonkean. You can learn more about Tonkean at www.tonkean.com.