Interview With Bert van der Zwan, CEO at Bizzdesign On Enterprise Transformation

Tell us about Bizzdesign.

Enterprise transformation has never been more urgent, or more complex. Organisations today are navigating constant technological change, regulatory pressure, and the acceleration of AI. Most don’t struggle because they lack ideas or ambition. They struggle because strategy, architecture, portfolios, and governance aren’t aligned.

Bizzdesign exists to solve that problem. We are a global SaaS company with Dutch roots, founded in 2000 and now operating across 18 countries. We provide enterprise transformation software that helps large organisations plan, design, and govern change. How? By giving them a clear view of how their strategy, technology, processes, and investments connect, and what happens when one part changes. In practical terms, it gives leaders a digital map of their entire business. With that visibility, they understand impact before they act and move from strategy to execution with confidence.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

The company grew out of a research project in the Netherlands in the mid-1990s. Organisations were becoming more digital, but they had no disciplined way to understand how their systems, processes, and structures actually connected. A team at the University of Twente set out to make the invisible visible by building a formal method and software to map that structure. That work became Bizzdesign in 2000.

The Dutch Tax Office participated in the original research and became our first customer. They’re still with us today, which reflects the long-term nature of the problem we set out to solve. We were built around a structural need inside complex organisations, not around a passing market trend. What began with enterprise architecture has evolved as transformation itself has broadened, but the foundation is the same: helping organisations understand themselves before they try to change.

Tell us about your core product or service.

Bizzdesign is the only provider to offer an end-to-end enterprise transformation suite. It spans enterprise architecture, application portfolio management, strategic portfolio management, business process management, and governance, risk and compliance. These may appear as separate disciplines, but they govern the same transformation decisions. Without a unified view over the moving parts of their digital business, organizations struggle to align investment to strategy, govern AI, and manage technical debt in a coherent, coordinated way.

We are also investing in AI across the enterprise transformation suite, embedding intelligent insights, natural language interaction, and Model Context Protocol connectivity so teams can work more effectively with the AI tools they already use.

What most excites you about the enterprise transformation industry?

We’re in the era of intelligence. AI has moved beyond side experiments and is becoming a structural capability that affects strategy, risk, investment, and operating models. But there’s a gap: deploying AI tools is straightforward. Scaling them responsibly and profitably is a different problem entirely, and enterprise architecture is built for exactly that challenge. It provides the visibility, alignment, and governance that allow AI to move from isolated pilots to enterprise-wide impact. The discipline that’s always been about managing complexity is now critical to the biggest transformation enterprises face.

At the same time, AI is redefining the architecture profession itself. It’s removing the repetitive work, freeing architects to focus on strategic decisions. Architects are also designing AI-native operating models where AI agents and capabilities are built in from the ground up, not bolted on later. The shift from documentation to orchestration changes the value architecture brings to the boardroom and to the business.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome along the way?

The most significant challenge has been integration with intent. In 2025, we merged three established market leaders, Bizzdesign, MEGA International, and Alfabet, each with deep customer bases and complementary platforms. The goal was to create the end-to-end enterprise transformation platform the market increasingly demands, bringing together capabilities across enterprise architecture, strategic portfolio management, and governance. That required aligning products, people, and roadmaps behind a shared direction while continuing to serve customers and innovate without disruption.

Integration at that level requires clarity and discipline. You’re combining teams with deep expertise, strong cultures, and loyal customers, and you have to ensure the result is stronger than the individual parts. That discipline is paying off. Analysts are recognising the strategic logic behind the convergence, identifying Bizzdesign as one of three revenue leaders shaping the future of enterprise architecture innovation.

What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Bizzdesign grew as a bootstrapped company, without external financing or investment. This meant we always operated in a disciplined, profitable way, where we stayed masters of our own destiny.

There is a lot of hype and marketing around the Silicon Valley VC funding model, but the success rate is very low and most ventures in this model crash and burn.
We believe in a sustainable business model where we can be trusted long-term partners with our customers.

Joining forces with Main Capital Partners, our private equity investor, has enabled us to take Bizzdesign to the next level, staying within this sustainable model.

What can we hope to see from Bizzdesign in the future?

As AI adoption accelerates, the real differentiator will be having access to reliable enterprise context, not just to models. Artificial intelligence creates value when it can reason over how strategy, systems, processes, and investments connect. That’s why you’ll see us continue to embed AI into the structural fabric of enterprise transformation.

We’re also investing in making that structured enterprise intelligence broadly accessible across the business, so teams can collaborate around the same enterprise reality with AI agents that support and assist them. When people and the AI working alongside them share visibility into dependencies, risks, and priorities from the start, alignment happens earlier, decisions move faster, and investments begin to demonstrate value sooner. That’s where transformation can flow in the AI era.