A unique can-do ecosystem cross pollinating best practices

At 9altitudes you can truly experience cross-pollination at work across an International organization of Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French and Slovenes. 9AHero’s really lift each other and customers to new heights.

When I joined 9altitudes mid-2021 I was immediately impressed about the quality of the people, their pragmatism, business expertise and “can do” mentality.

At that time 7 companies were already “bought”, taking the first steps to become a group. Each individual company had a very entrepreneurial spirit, first-class in their focus domains and market, all able to bring something unique to the table.

They were carefully selected by our CEO Filip Bossuyt and investment group Waterland based on their main focus markets, solution portfolio and competences.

One of my first jobs was to organize, together with my 2 top-notch Go-to-market colleagues, a first International On Cloud9 Summit, bringing together all sales, marketing and management people across the 5 countries in our group. Although preparing this within a limited time-frame was a challenge, I’ve enjoyed the journey as much as the destination.

Analysing the customer footprint, organization, value propositions, IP and key-differentiators from all different companies within the group brought incredible insights.

First of all we saw based on facts that together we covered at that time already more than 600 customers in Manufacturing. Without blushing we could proudly state that at 9altitudes we are really Kings in Manufacturing in Europe!

We also discovered many different Own-IP solutions filling industry-specific gaps in the Microsoft and PTC world-class proven platforms which deliver high added-value to customers. The basis for our actual 9A Own-IP Suite.

We all have the same D9A

Learning to know each other, better understanding the different cultures within the 5 countries and even in the different companies within the same country was very valuable. We’ve learned we all have the same Attitudes in our DNA: we’re All about people, we’re Action oriented, having Active conversations with our Awesome customers which we bring to new heights with our Applied expertise. These 5 A’s form the basis of our OurD9A.

A very important statement I retained from one of our Active conversations was the fact that we in every circumstance need to stay “A small company with a lot of employees”. For me this is a cornerstone of our Corporate collaboration. Keep local proximity and decision frameworks with access to a great network of more than 500 experts in Europe. I’ve seen too many “Corporate companies” pushing everything top-down from head-office killing all local entrepreneurial spirit and dynamics.

We’ve chosen a more challenging approach: we create structures for cross-pollination where colleagues can choose to adopt because they want to and see the added value. By doing this we are really creating mutual-involvement, deep-commitment and even transcend 1+1=3.

Today I’m experiencing this work in real-life and people are cross-pollinating best-practices bringing each other to new heights so our tagline “Reach new heights” is effectively put in practice.

And of course at 9altitudes there are also some corporate “musts”, but in all circumstances we try to limit the push and focus on the why behind things as well as the value for each other.

At the time of our commercial On Cloud9 Summit, two additional companies joined our group, coincidence (or not?) but we were 9 individual companies who attended our On Cloud9 Summit and left with enormous ambitions to reach new heights with 9altitudes.

Written by Tim Verpoorten, Corporate Marketing & Business Development Director at 9altitudes