Katherine Kostereva Interview For Website Planet: “Low Code Reshapes The Future Of Business”

In this interview, Creatio CEO and managing partner Katherine Kostereva lays out the story behind the company and shares her insights on how to accelerate business growth through low-code automation.

Ditsa Keren: Please describe the background behind Creatio. What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?

Katherine Kostereva: Creatio (formerly bpm’online) was founded with the aim of helping businesses accelerate digital transformation and bringing their business ideas to life through automation. In the early stages of my career, I felt the need for a system that could effectively manage customer relations and automate business processes. The idea of creating a powerful tool that would be agile enough and allow for easy integration of new technologies grew stronger in my mind as I heard from other young professionals and entrepreneurs that they experienced the same difficulties I encountered. So with a handful of like-minded leaders, we set out to create a CRM that would encompass marketing, sales, and service on a single platform and allow users to change processes on the fly. We bootstrapped the company without any external capital or funding.

Now Creatio is a global software company with offices in the USA, Europe, and APAC region, 600+ employees, and a network of partners in 110 countries. Our products are highly recognized by key industry analysts and have one of the highest NPS in the industry.

Last October we renamed from bpm’online to Creatio and believe that the new name reflects our vision and mission better. Creatio has always been a platform to automate ideas and create custom solutions in minutes without coding. Last year we finally expressed this clearly with our new name.

Ditsa Keren: How does Creatio work? 

Katherine Kostereva: Creatio is low-code platform for process management and CRM. Our mission is to help companies accelerate by providing a platform to automate their business ideas faster and easier.

We offer three CRM products – Sales Creatio, Marketing Creatio, and Service Creatio – to automate workflows, streamline processes and accelerate operations within the entire organization. These products exist on a unified platform and can be used separately or bundled. 

On top of these, we provide a low-code process automation platform in the form of two editions: Studio Creatio Free, which is a free software to accelerate process design and Studio Creatio Enterprise, an intelligent low-code platform enabling enterprises to build apps and processes with drag and drop components.

The four backbones in our Transformation cycle allow us to deliver on our mission of helping companies accelerate. 

Creatio ACCELERATES IMPLEMENTATION. The platform comes with a set of out-of-the-box processes, integrations, and solutions to ensure that users can implement and start reaping the benefits of the software in a matter of days or weeks instead of months or years.

Creatio ACCELERATES ADOPTION. If a platform has a steep learning curve, it will have low user adoption rates. To ensure this is not an issue, Creatio uses a leading UX and AI capabilities to raise and quicken the pace of user adoption within an organization.

Creatio ACCELERATES TRANSFORMATION. Powerful capabilities enable businesses to orchestrate processes and applications from front-office to back-office, accelerating organizational alignment. This along with the usage of low-code to automate processes promotes and accelerates change within a business, giving them the agility and scalability needed to transform and remain competitive within their respective market.

Creatio ACCELERATES CHANGE. The development of processes and applications via a low-code platform is significantly faster than traditional development methods, as little to no coding is needed and non-professionals throughout an organization can develop their own solutions without the help of IT. This helps enterprises accelerate ongoing transformation and implement necessary changes faster.

Ditsa Keren: What are the most eminent challenges that online businesses are struggling with these days, and how does Creatio make it easier?

Katherine Kostereva: We live in a fast-changing environment, which requires businesses to adapt to changes quickly or quit. Companies need to transform and automate everything – including workflows and all possible manual tasks – to keep up in the modern market. Many do so by creating apps that their employees need at work. 

A growing IT delivery gap caused by a lack of IT resources, long backlog for internal tech professionals, and piling requests from various departments for tech assistance is one of the challenges businesses are struggling with these days. To shrink it, more and more CIOs consider low-code platforms as a solution that can empower teams to become citizen developers and create apps, business processes, templates, and software customizations in a visual interface.

We at Creatio strongly believe the future is low-code, and are very happy to play a role in creating a world where everyone can automate business ideas in minutes.

Ditsa Keren: What do you do to secure user information on your platform?

Katherine Kostereva: Creatio software undergoes regular reviews to ensure it complies with international standards. The security of the software and business processes is maintained in compliance with world best practices and is being continuously audited by independent experts. Our cloud services and software has the ISO 27001 compliance certificate. 

Creatio’s data is stored in different geographical areas on professional hosting platforms – Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure – which ensure high-level security from unauthorized access to servers. We also follow the GDPR regulations, and our certified specialists perform regular control and optimization of the security measures. 

Ditsa Keren: How do you envision the future of online business in 5 years from now?

Katherine Kostereva: Online business owners are among the early adopters of innovative technologies that automate routine and free up employees from manual tasks so they could dedicate their time to developing strategies and coming up with creative approaches to win customers. 

In five years, we will see a far more significant shift towards a world where less coding, manual data processing, and operational decision-making will be required. I believe adapting to changes at the speed that the market is key to ensuring both high efficiency and profitability in the short and long run for any business, including online companies. 

Initially published on websiteplanet.com.