RecordTailorEvery life counts. Eventually: every record measures.
I'm not a document person. I trained in two professions where 99.9 % doesn't exist: airline pilot with Austrian Airlines and air traffic controller with Austro Control. The selection tests for both are among the toughest anywhere in the world — the DLR psychometric assessment in Hamburg with its failure rate north of 98 %, and the multi-day Austro Control assessment where people find out how resilient they really are, often for the first time in their lives. Tens of thousands apply, a few dozen make it through. I made it through both.
I'm also a MENSA member — which, if I'm honest, says less than the cockpit test. IQ measures how fast you think. The cockpit test measures how calm you stay when the indicator top-right has been showing something wrong for five seconds and you have to be the first to notice. In aviation, the second is the quality that matters. And in both professions one principle overshadows everything else: every life counts. Not 999 out of 1 000. All of them.
If you want to know whether that's professional posture or operating system, one small detail: when I picked up tennis again in autumn 2025 after a thirty-year break, I didn't look for the local club coach. I found one who had spent decades working with ATP top-10 players. Not because I plan to return to the tour. Because when I take something seriously, I want to know where my ceiling really sits — not where an average coach would guess it. Business or private life: same posture.
That imprint doesn't leave you when you hand over the yoke. If you've spent years — in the cockpit or in the tower — checking every action for repeatability, every procedure for traceability, every outcome for completeness, you cannot switch it off when you move into a different field. You look at every system and measure it: does it deliver 100 %? Or only „most of the time"?
How KSIC became CloudDNA.
I founded CloudDNA ten years ago — originally under a different name. I came from SAP at the time, where I had spent years inside one of the largest software companies in the world. A safe harbour. Precisely the place you don't leave when you have kids, a house and a serious face. I left anyway.
The starting point was a clumsy name: KSIC GmbH — Koch Security, Integration and Cloud Consulting. Four letters no one could pronounce, wrapped in a description that said everything and nothing. I quickly realised: that's the second thing you don't do when leaving SAP — give yourself a name that sounds like a compliance standard.
The rescue arrived at dinner — though I didn't know it yet. Blankenese, Hamburg, a fish restaurant on the Elbe. I was visiting an old SAP colleague — Jörg, one of those people you call an SAP guru without it sounding cheesy. Along came Daniel, my very first employee at the time, on his very first business trip. He wasn't seated at the fish table — the two old hands wanted a quiet talk. (Daniel, if you ever read this: I'm still sorry about the turbot.)
We drank a white Burgundy and I tried, for the third time, to explain my company name. Jörg cut me off, raised his glass and said a single sentence: „Martin, you've got the Cloud in your DNA."
No lecture. No analysis. One sentence.
The next morning I stood up in a Hamburg hotel room, looked out of the window, and thought: CloudDNA — that would be a great name. Two weeks later, KSIC GmbH was no longer KSIC. And Daniel has been on many business trips since — usually with a seat at the table.
Chapeau, Jörg. Without that one sentence at that one table we'd still be KSIC, and you'd still have to explain what the four letters mean at every reunion. A dinner that was worth it. A colleague worth keeping.
What stayed are three things that have shaped the company from day one — and me as a person anyway:
- A love of good food and honest wine. Important decisions here don't happen in meeting rooms. They happen at tables with good light.
- Travel — with customers all over Europe, with our own team in regions we source talent from or where we accompany our customers. Every second trip becomes a wine trip, whether we planned it or not.
- Southern Burgenland as our base — the spa region, the wine region. Not Vienna, not Berlin, not San Francisco. We sit where our team lives, and draw from two talent forges you won't find on any world map: the HTL Pinkafeld and the FH Burgenland. Without either, this company wouldn't exist.
We started in a tiny office in Oberwart. Today we sit in the former Raiffeisenbank in Loipersdorf, right in the spa region. A building that once had a different relationship with the sky, if you like: upward. From modest beginnings to a place with a bit more room — that's progress.
The duo with Daniel has grown into a team of more than twenty people. We've published seventeen books at SAP Press — mixed subjects, but always from practice, never from marketing. That's the kind of mileage you can't invent.
Our motto — „We deliver" — means two things: customer commitments, and a glass of wine at the right moment. We see ourselves as a modern, agile SAP startup. We are not the Titanic of consulting houses; we are a regatta boat. Quick course changes, small turning circle, no three-week meeting marathon to reach a decision.
The sky is the limit. And yes — the cloud is sometimes cloudy. But that's exactly why we have it in our genes.
Ten years of filing cabinets. Then one sentence.
For those ten years I worked with CloudDNA in a corner nobody sees from the outside: SAP integrations, document flows, archives. In every larger project we found the same pattern. You start with a slide showing how documents travel through the house. SAP reads the paper, an OCR server pushes it into an archive, a clerk approves, the archive links back to SAP. On the slide it looks like a motorway. In reality it's a country road that passes a waiting room every second kilometre.
I've seen customers pay more in annual license fees for their DMS than for their HR system. I've seen customers create a dedicated full-time position just to manually correct metadata on scanned documents. I met a board member of a regional cooperative who told me:
„We pay a six-figure sum a year for an archive that our bookkeeper asks to search in Excel, because that's where the invoices are actually findable."
For someone from the cockpit, that's the kind of sentence the principle grips onto. That isn't 99.9 %. That isn't even 50 %. That's a system paid to fail at its own purpose.
The country road turns motorway — with AI.
In 2024 something became possible that had not been possible before: a locally running model that looks at an invoice PDF and, in seconds, knows what it is. Not from a cloud black box — on a GPU that sits in our customer's own server room.
I first built it as an experiment, for one customer. On day two the bookkeeper called: „Can this thing also find the contracts where we committed to a monthly invoice roll-up?" On day three: „And the contracts where cancellation windows are about to close?" I realised I was no longer working at the edge of the DMS. I was building the DMS.
We reinvented ourselves. Because AI forced us to.
I built CloudDNA to make SAP integrations for large enterprises — heavy software, in monthly rhythms, six-figure proposals. In that world, custom software was the red rag. For us. For our customers. For everyone. You avoided it like the plague: too expensive, too slow, too risky. Standard software with a hundred compromises was considered the sensible choice.
Until 2023.
When I first worked seriously with language models, it hit me: this is not a gradual improvement. This is the shift that rewrites our craft. And for the software shops — the enterprise consultancies, the SAP forges, the niche workshops — a real threat. Not in five years. In eighteen months.
I did two things with that. First: I sat down and built software myself — not because I do it better than my people, but because I wanted to understand how our profession is changing. And because I don't believe you can explain AI-assisted development to your team in a PowerPoint. You have to live it, at night, at your own editor, with the same tools you recommend to them.
Second: I turned the insight into a product line. Because the cost curve has shifted. What used to be three months and a six-figure sum can be done in two weeks now. Not because programmers suddenly perform magic — but because they work with copilots that take over the drudgery, and programmers become again what they should have been all along: craftsmen with a head on their shoulders, not typists on a deadline.
Custom software isn't a luxury under these conditions any more. It's the most reasonable thing a software house can offer a customer.
Instead of just talking about it, I wanted to live it in front of my team. So I picked domains I knew well enough — or where I have friends who explain the problem to me every week until it sticks — and built honestly:
- TaxTailor — for tax firms, because a friend told me at a glass of wine about his Windows terminal server.
- DineTailor — for hospitality, because I've spent years at other people's tables selling champagne to restaurateurs.
- StayTailor — for hotels, because the spa region of Loipersdorf is full of businesses ducking under the pricing dictates of the portals.
- MeetingTailor — for boards and councils, because my circle of friends is full of foundation trustees, town councillors and association boards who all describe the same late-night scene.
- DocumentTailor — for SAP houses, because I spent fifteen years building forms on SAP Adobe Document Services and no longer wanted the successor question left open.
- RecordTailor — for anyone who needs a DMS that not only stores, but reads. Because I've too often sat at the table where a bookkeeper secretly opens Excel because DMS search is too slow.
Tailored tools for industries that generic US cloud portals have served poorly for years. CloudDNA is no longer an SAP supplier — it's a workshop with a growing product line. Riskier economically. And the most honest thing we could do, humanly.
If RecordTailor convinces you, that's the reason.
The sibling workshops: taxtailor.at · dinetailor.com · staytailor.com · meetingtailor.com · documenttailor.com
Every record measures.
The claim isn't a pun. It's the direct translation of what aviation leaves in you, into a DMS. Every life counts becomes every record measures: every document counts, every document is measurable, every document deserves to be findable — not 999 out of 1 000. All of them.
We build RecordTailor the way a controller clears a traffic sector: no blind spots, with auditable procedures, with a hash chain across every decision. And we hand it over the way a cockpit crew does: with a clean checklist, no loose ends.
What happens next.
We ship RecordTailor as a product — if you like your Kubernetes cluster, run it yourself. And we run it as a managed service — if you'd rather sleep and let us take the night shift. Two paths, one product. None of it goes into a multi-tenant cloud your competitor also uses.
If you have a document you can't find any more — send it to us. In half an hour we'll show you what RecordTailor does with it. And if we're not the right fit, we'll say so. Honestly. Like in the tower.