Never give up. The sky is the limit.

01Who I am

Every life counts. Not 999 out of 1,000.

Before I built software, I learned two professions in which there is no such thing as 99.9 %: airline pilot with Austrian Airlines and air traffic controller with Austro Control. The entrance tests for both are among the toughest in the world – the DLR test in Hamburg with a failure rate north of 98 %, the multi-day assessment at Austro Control in which people find out how resilient they really are. Tens of thousands apply, a few dozen get through. I passed both.

IQ measures how fast someone thinks. The cockpit test measures how calm someone stays when the display at the top right has been showing something wrong for five seconds and you have to be the first to notice. In aviation, the second one counts. And above everything stands one principle: every life counts. Not 999 out of 1,000. All of them.

A professional pose or an operating system? When I took up tennis again in autumn 2025 after a thirty-year break, I looked for a coach who had worked with ATP top-10 players for decades. Not because I want to go on tour – but because when I take something seriously, I want to know where my ceiling really is.

02At home

Three children, one father, no autopilot.

I am a single father of three children. The two younger ones are of school age, the eldest is an adult. Anyone who knows this knows: there is no roster that holds and no day that ends the way it was planned. You learn to set priorities in seconds – and to re-sort them the next morning.

My eldest son is severely disabled. He lives with a rare genetic defect, a microdeletion. He has taught me more about patience, reliability and what really matters than any assessment and any project.

My three children are the centre of my life and my motivation – every single day.

When I say “every life counts”, it is no longer a phrase from the cockpit. It is everyday life. And it is the reason I build software that gives people time back – time that is needed more urgently elsewhere.

My life has changed massively through all of this. I have become even more structured than I was used to from the cockpit – and that is exactly why, in the early morning hours before the house wakes up, there is room every day for an hour of sport: kettlebell, rope skipping, boxing. Not despite the responsibility, but because of it.

I am convinced: what matters most is the daily routine.

Big goals are not reached with big days, but with many ordinary ones that reliably start the same way. That is exactly how we build software: it should carry the daily routine – unspectacular, reliable, every day – so that head and time remain for the unplannable.

Never give up.
The sky is the limit.

My motto. Not a poster on the wall – a decision, every morning.

03One sentence in Hamburg

How KSIC became CloudDNA.

I founded CloudDNA more than ten years ago – originally not under that name. I came from SAP, where I had spent years at one of the largest software companies in the world. A safe harbour. I left it anyway.

It started with an unwieldy name: KSIC GmbH – Koch Security, Integration and Cloud Consulting. Four letters nobody could pronounce. Rescue came over dinner in Blankenese, Hamburg, at a fish restaurant on the Elbe. My old SAP colleague Jörg listened to my explanation for the third time, raised his glass and said a single sentence:

“Martin, you have the cloud in your DNA.”

Two weeks later KSIC GmbH was no longer called KSIC. Daniel, my first employee, was already there – on his very first business trip. (Daniel, I am still sorry about the turbot.)

We started in a tiny office in Oberwart. Today we work in the former Raiffeisen bank in Loipersdorf, in the middle of the spa and wine region of southern Burgenland, and draw on two talent schools you will not find on any world map: HTL Pinkafeld and the University of Applied Sciences Burgenland. The duo has become a team of 24 people, and we have published seventeen books with SAP PRESS – always from practice, never from marketing.

04The upheaval

Custom software was a red rag. Until 2023.

I built CloudDNA to create SAP integrations for large corporations – heavy software, paced in months. In that world custom software was avoided like the plague: too expensive, too slow, too risky.

Then came the language models.

I realised: this is not a gradual improvement, it is the upheaval that rewrites our craft. So I sat down myself and built software – at night, in my own editor, with the same tools I recommend to my team. You cannot explain AI-assisted development to anyone with a PowerPoint. You have to live it.

What used to take three months and a six-figure sum now takes weeks. Not because programmers work magic, but because copilots take over the drudgery and developers become what they should be: craftspeople with a head.

05We build it

From “We deliver” to “Wir bauen das”.

For more than ten years our promise was “We deliver”: a customer describes, we deliver. That made us big. But it has a limit: whoever only delivers what is ordered rarely builds what is needed.

That is why we are rebuilding ourselves. Consultants and developers are becoming forward deployed engineers and product owners. Forward deployed means: they sit where the problem arises – in the property management office, at the winery, in the law firm – and build on site. Product owner means: they stay until it is solved and own the product, not the ticket.

“Wir bauen das.” Three words you may only say to a customer if you mean them.

06We speak AI

Inside the AI bubble and, above all, outside it.

Inside the AI bubble everyone talks about models, benchmarks and agents. Outside – with the property manager running a thousand units, the winemaker in southern Burgenland, the restaurateur with twenty tables – a different question counts: Will this save me an hour tomorrow, and can I rely on it?

We translate between these worlds. We build with Claude by Anthropic every day and are well on the way to becoming an Anthropic partner. But what reaches the customer is not a model, it is a workflow that works:

• The AI proposes, a human decides. More autonomy comes only after a passed probation period.
• Every action is in the audit trail. What the AI did can be read back.
• AI has to pay for itself. Own key, fixed cost cap per tenant.
• Data stays where it belongs. Tenants separated down to the database.

Anthropic and Claude are trademarks of Anthropic PBC. The mention describes how we work.

07The Tailor family

Made to measure instead of standard with a hundred compromises.

Instead of just talking about AI-assisted development, we picked industries I know well enough – or in which I have friends who explain the problem to me until it sticks. Every Tailor shares the same foundation with its siblings, but speaks the language of its industry:

• iFlowTailor – for SAP integration, which I have been building since 2006: the tools for development and operations never did the job for me – so we are building the workbench for development, operations and administration in one.
• ProbeTailor – for acceptance tests in SAP projects and business software, because in all my years of SAP consulting I have seen too many acceptance tests in Excel lists and too many screenshots in e-mails.
• JournalTailor – for accounts payable before SAP, BMD and DATEV, because in SAP projects I have too often watched invoices being retyped although the posting behind them has long been routine.
• DocumentTailor – for SAP shops, because I spent fifteen years building forms on SAP Adobe Document Services and did not want to leave the succession question unanswered any longer.
• RecordTailor – for everyone who needs a DMS that does not just store but reads – because I have too often seen someone secretly open Excel because the DMS is too slow.
• ImmoTailor – for property managers and developers, because accounting, maintenance and portals get in each other’s way there more than anywhere.
• TaxTailor – for tax firms, because a friend told me about his Windows terminal server over a glass of wine.
• DineTailor – for restaurants, because for years I have been sitting at other people’s tables selling champagne to restaurateurs.
• StayTailor – for hotels, because the spa region is full of businesses ducking under the booking portals’ terms.
• MeetingTailor – for meetings and boards, because foundation boards, councils and club committees among my friends keep describing the same late-night scene.
• Weintailor – for winemakers, because we sit in the middle of a wine region and every other trip turns into a wine trip anyway.
• BuildTailor – for construction and trades, because defects, plans and daily reports happen on site – not in the office.
• AuthTailor – for single sign-on, because in my SAP projects logins keep failing without saying why. We first built the tracer for ourselves in iFlowTailor – now we give it to everyone for free.

CloudDNA is therefore no longer just an SAP supplier, but a workshop with a growing product line. Bolder in business. Humanly the most honest thing we could do.

08Why AuthTailor

Single sign-on works. Until it doesn’t. And then it won’t say why.

Together with Siegfried Zeilinger I wrote the books on security and authorizations, Cloud Connector and administration of SAP BTP¹. They explain how trust between SAP BTP and the identity provider is set up, how principal propagation runs through the Cloud Connector and which role collection brings which scope. What no book covers: what it is like when everything seems to be set up correctly and the login still fails. A login has many stops, and it can get stuck at any of them:

1. Browser
2. App
3. Identity provider
4. SAML response or token
5. Role collection
6. 403 Forbidden

The error messages are remarkably terse: “invalid_grant”. “Assertion is not valid”. An error number in the identity provider, whose log sits in another tenant that belongs to another team. And the app simply says 403.

Everyone sees their part. Nobody sees the whole flow.

The browser’s developer tools show the requests, but not what they mean. A SAML response is Base64, often compressed as well; a JWT is three parts of alphabet soup separated by dots. Anyone who wants to read them copies them from window to window – and hands over the token of a real login along the way. For someone who wrote a book on security on SAP BTP, that is not a workflow you can recommend.

In aviation, there is a flight recorder for moments like these. After an incident, nobody guesses – you read the recording: every step, in the right order, with a timestamp. That is exactly what I wanted for a login.

So we built the flight recorder for single sign-on.

First for ourselves: as the SAML & OIDC tracer in iFlowTailor², the workbench for SAP Cloud Integration – it still lives there. Then it became clear that the problem is not limited to people working with SAP Cloud Integration. Every app with SAML or OpenID Connect has it, with SAP or without. That is why AuthTailor exists as an extension of its own.

And why free? Because single sign-on keeps causing trouble in our own SAP projects – and because everyone who has to set up, run or explain logins in support feels the same. Putting a tool we need ourselves behind a paywall would have felt wrong. AuthTailor is free, with no account and no licence³. Five ideas it is built on:

1. Idea 1 · The flight recorder

   Record first, judge second.

   An error rarely shows where it starts. AuthTailor records the whole login live⁴, in any tab, and checks state, nonce and PKCE across all steps – not just the last request that turned red.

2. Idea 2 · No server

   A token does not belong on anyone else’s machine.

   Whoever examines logins has real tokens in front of them. That is why AuthTailor has no server and no telemetry⁵, keeps recordings in memory only⁶ and masks secrets as they are recorded⁷.

3. Idea 3 · Clearance for one flight

   Access only as long as it is needed.

   As an air traffic controller you give clearance for exactly one flight, not for the whole day. AuthTailor works the same way: access to websites is requested only for recording and handed back afterwards⁸.

4. Idea 4 · Cause before symptom

   “403” is not a finding.

   A status code says that something is missing, but not what. The traffic light⁹ shows in which area it breaks, and on SAP BTP “Why 403?” answers the question scope by scope¹⁰.

5. Idea 5 · Understand instead of copy

   If you know the flow, you find the error yourself.

   That is what we wanted to achieve with the books, and the panel should do it too: 13 flows of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and SAML¹¹ to click through, step by step, with a glossary and an error catalogue.