Partner Pulse: How Aria PSW Builds AI-Ready Digital Experiences Across Latin America

Aria PSW has spent more than a decade helping large organizations across Latin America turn digital ambition into products people actually enjoy using. That track record just earned Aria PSW recognition as Liferay's LatAm Partner of the Year. In this Partner Pulse interview, CEO Erwin Grautoff talks with Liferay's Christoph Ebert about what makes personalization stick, why a minimum viable product isn't the same as a minimum lovable one, and how Aria PSW keeps a customer's AI ambition from outrunning its data.

A Decade of Partnership, Now Recognized as LatAm Partner of the Year

Aria PSW has worked with Liferay for more than ten years, building personalized digital experiences for some of the largest companies in Latin America. That long-running relationship was recently recognized when Aria PSW was named Liferay's 2025 LatAm Partner of the Year.

As Erwin describes it, the partnership works because both companies share the same orientation toward people. Liferay, he says, is a genuinely partner-friendly company with strong solutions for the market, and that relationship has helped Aria PSW help its own customers succeed.

Personalization Built on Understanding the Customer's Strategy

Ask Erwin what Aria PSW's signature move is, and the answer isn't a specific feature or integration. It's a process. Across more than 200 projects with major Latin American companies, Aria PSW starts by understanding the customer's underlying business strategy, then works backward to the right technology.

That approach is backed by specialists with deep, vertical-specific knowledge of the markets Aria PSW serves, which lets the team combine technical expertise with real business context. The goal, Erwin says, isn't just a working solution. It's getting customers to a successful outcome as fast as realistically possible.

The Three Ingredients of a "Minimum Lovable Product"

Software teams talk a lot about minimum viable products, but building something people find merely "okay" is a much lower bar than building something they genuinely like. Asked for his blueprint for a minimum lovable product, Erwin points to three elements:

1. User experience for the specific customer's context.
2. Customer journey, mapped from beginning to end.
3. KPIs, so the value of the solution can actually be measured: the return it generates and how well it performs against the customer's own success metrics.

Why AI Ambition Needs a Data-Ready Foundation First

Every customer wants AI right now, and Erwin acknowledges the pressure is real and often justified. But Aria PSW's role, as he describes it, is to occasionally hit pause: is the underlying data actually ready for the solution the customer wants to build?

That means getting the data strategy right before accelerating toward an AI-ready platform. Erwin describes it as a stoplight approach: know when to slow down and when it's safe to move fast, so the organization moves quickly without moving carelessly.

Knowing When to Say No

That same discipline sometimes means turning down what a client is asking for. Erwin shared an example, without naming the client, where a customer wanted to build billing functionality directly into their portal. Technically, the platform could support it. But Erwin recommended against it: the right architecture was to keep billing logic in the organization's ERP system and use Liferay's integration capabilities to connect the customer portal to it, rather than duplicating that logic in the portal itself. Every part of the solution, he says, belongs in its correct place.

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About Aria PSW

Aria PSW is an innovation studio that designs and builds custom solutions in integration, data, cloud, and digital experience. The company helps organizations move toward a digital culture by unifying, transforming, and modernizing their technology, strengthening their market position along the way.

• +150 information technology projects
• +250,000 person-hours in consulting
• +25 million users across corporate portals
• +3,000 web services delivered
• Strategic alliances with leading global technology providers

Interview Transcript

Below is a lightly edited version of the conversation for readability.

Liferay: Hello everyone, and welcome to another Partner Pulse interview. Today I'm talking to Erwin Grautoff, CEO of Aria PSW. Welcome, Erwin.

Erwin Grautoff: Hello, Christoph. Nice to see you.

Liferay: Nice to see you. Aria PSW works with organizations across Latin America on projects in digital experience, personalization, and AI-driven initiatives. Today we'll explore how the partnership with Liferay supports those goals.

Erwin, before we get to a number of interesting topics, congratulations are in order. You've just been announced as LatAm Partner of the Year. Congratulations on winning the award. Tell us a bit more about Aria PSW, your role there, and how the relationship with Liferay started.

Erwin Grautoff: Thank you, I'm very happy about that. We've been working with Liferay for more than ten years. At Aria, we have a lot of experience with large companies in Latin America. We work with them to create experiences and build IT solutions that create good business outcomes, helping our customers succeed.

With Liferay, we work well together because Liferay is a very partner-friendly company. It's a worldwide company with some of the best solutions on the market for digital experience, and they're people-oriented when it comes to partnership. We work together to help customers succeed in everything, and I'm happy to keep working together with them.

Liferay: Let's look at the topic of personalization. You do a lot of projects that involve personalization, helping organizations consistently create personalized digital experiences. Is there a signature move, a specialty, something that's a success factor for Aria in personalization projects?

Erwin Grautoff: We have a lot of experience delivering these kinds of projects. We've done more than 200 projects with the biggest companies in Latin America, and in each one we work to build the right solution for that specific customer. We try to understand the customer's strategy first, then work with them to create the right solution using the right technology to help them succeed.

We have a lot of people working with us, specialists with deep knowledge of the technology and vertical solutions for their markets. We make sure to combine that knowledge to build the right solution, and we help our customers deliver projects faster so they can succeed in the shortest time possible.

Liferay: In software projects, there's often talk about minimum viable products. But building something that's lovable, something users don't just find okay to use but something they genuinely like, is a lot harder. If you had to define a blueprint for a minimum lovable product or portal, are there maybe three factors you'd point to?

Erwin Grautoff: Three things matter a lot: user experience, customer journey, and KPIs. User experience means the right solution for that specific customer. Customer journey means understanding the journey from beginning to end, what the customer is actually looking for. And KPIs matter because you have to measure the solution: how it's creating value for the customer, what kind of return it generates, and how successful it is against the customer's own metrics.

Liferay: I'm sure you also meet a lot of teams at your customers who are very excited about AI right now. It's the buzzword, and a lot of organizations want to jump straight into AI solutions, sometimes for good reason. How do you slow things down with a customer to make sure the data is solid first? Put another way, how do you prevent an organization's AI ambition from outrunning its data?

Erwin Grautoff: AI is very important right now because it helps customers build good solutions. But we have to work with them and sometimes say: stop and think before doing that. For example, is your data actually ready for the solution you want? You need the right data strategy first, and then you'll have the right solution.

After that, of course, you accelerate the process and accelerate data solutions for the customer. It's a bit like a stoplight: red light, green light. You help them move faster, but move faster with care.

Liferay: I'm sure you've probably also had to say no to a client at times, since you've already touched on slowing things down. Is there an example, without naming the client, where you had to say no because what they wanted would have created a risk or a bad experience in the long term?

Erwin Grautoff: Yes, we had an experience with one customer. Of course, I won't give you the name, but they wanted to build billing directly into the portal. And the thinking was, "you can do that, of course the software can do that, Liferay can do that." But the right strategy was to build the right integration instead. The ERP is the right place for the billing logic. The digital experience just needs to connect to it. Every part of the solution needs to be in its correct place. So I had to say no, the right solution keeps every part where it belongs, and we used Liferay's integration capabilities to connect to that system properly instead.

Liferay: Thanks a lot for your time and for your insights, walking us through personalization, AI, and more. Lots of food for thought, and I really appreciate you being here.

Erwin Grautoff: Thank you very much for this conversation. I'm happy to be here in Vienna.

See What a DXP Built for Personalization and AI Can Do for You

Whether you're designing a customer portal customers actually enjoy or preparing your organization for AI without duplicating logic across systems, Liferay DXP and partners like Aria PSW can help you get there.

👉 Request a demo to see how Liferay DXP powers real-world transformation across Latin America.