Harald Grumser: I managed Compart for 29 years and developed it up to Compart 4.0. Now it‘s time for younger people to take the helm. Compart is my child, and it has now flown. I’ll continue accompanying it with a lot of advice and a little less action and make sure this child continues to do well.
To put it bluntly: Compart has never been in such a good position. It currently has the best-prepared management team in the company‘s history.
Four years ago, we set out to transfer our entire product portfolio to a new, component-based architecture. When we realized how difficult it was for our development team to break down the previous product silos, I took over the department myself. At the time, I said I would do it for three years. That time is up now, and we‘ve put development on a completely new footing. We‘ve invested eight figures developing new products and components that will secure our growth in the future.

Harald Grumser: For its first eight years, Compart was a project house that focused very strongly on OS/2 and developing individual solutions for customers. That was Compart 1.0. At the beginning of 2000, we made what was probably our most important entrepreneurial decision and transformed ourselves, with our print data converters, into a pure product house as Compart 2.0. From 2005, with internationalization and the expansion of our portfolio into the Doc-Bridge® multichannel solution product family, we were Compart 3.0. It was during that period we grew the most. Since 2015, we have been positioning ourselves as a platform for digital and transactional document-related processes. To that end, we have virtually reinvented ourselves as Compart 4.0.

Harald Grumser: We have been developing document components for almost 30 years now. That corresponds to about 800 person-years; more than 1.5M development hours. Since we have always attached importance to clean architectures and have placed little emphasis on ancillary trends, most of these classic products are still relevant and productive today. For example, our solution for fax compression, which is required for many formats such as TIFF, PDF, and AFP, dates back to 1993 and is probably the best-tested component ever. I know there are only a few providers with such a variety of technologies for document management that have this level of vertical integration in their portfolio. And it‘s also fully cloudenabled with compliance-proof development processes. Also, our customers appreciate that we don’t abandon anyone and we run a fair business. No one has to pay for defects that are Compart's fault, which unfortunately happens from time to time. That attitude doesn’t seem to be a matter of course with every company.

Harald Grumser: I'm chairman of the advisory board at the Böblingen/Sindelfingen Software Center, which provides about 800 jobs with more than 110 member companies. In addition, we are currently creating a business incubator called "AI Xpress" with 1.2 million Euros in funding from the Böblingen district. It‘s aimed at startups and young entrepreneurs with clever ideas in the field of artificial intelligence. I‘m also involved in various working groups in the district and am a founding member of the "Böblingen district remains colorful" initiative, which campaigns against racism and for diversity and cosmopolitanism. In addition, I‘m a sponsor and trustee of the Schatzsucher, an association that helps disadvantaged children participate in society. So my wife has no worries about having to amuse a bored retiree!

Dr. Wolfgang Köstler: Compart has been established in the market for years and has a great reputation. This is borne out by the growing number of well-known customers who are themselves market leaders in their respective industries. Our good reputation naturally creates an obligation. As Harald Grumser mentioned, we‘ve invested heavily in new products in recent years. These will now be stepped up and brought to market success in a targeted manner. We want to grow even more, especially in the product business (software licenses and subscriptions). Our strong financial position allows us to continue to invest in product development at a high level and, at the same time, expand geographically through the expansion of our sales force, not only in Europe but especially in North America. After all, our sales force and partners are already repre-sented in all major, Western markets, so we are in a good position to scale up further with new products on an international scale.

Dr. Wolfgang Köstler: One thing is certain — the trend toward outsourcing IT processes continues to increase. Companies no longer want to operate their own data centers and are looking to the cloud, whether private or public. We show them feasible solutions because in recent years we‘ve invested heavily to make our products cloud-capable. What's more, there‘s a glaring shortage of qualified IT specialists in Germany, which we are feeling particularly acutely at our headquarters in Böblingen. We are also now competing fiercely with the major automotive manufacturers and their suppliers for bright young talent. That's why it's important to us to position ourselves even more strongly as an attractive employer.

Thorsten Meudt: With the transformation to Compart 4.0, as Harald Grumser calls it, we have set the right priorities and put ourselves in a good starting position for the coming years. In addition to the architecture, we will focus very strongly on further expanding our offering functionally, especially in transactional processing, digital input and output channels, and interactive workflows. Integration into and interaction with third-party systems via interfaces that are as open as possible will also play a major role. In the past and current fiscal years, we have successfully implemented demanding projects for transactional and interactive processing in customer communication with our DocBridge® Gear and DocBridge® Impress solutions. The integration of document creation in Salesforce.com at WWF Switzerland has also become a reference. Based on the experience gained so far in these pilot projects, we intend to develop robust standard compo-nents in coming years, which will be available to all customers. Of course, this also includes the further development of our DocBridge® Pilot and DocBridge® Mill Plus solutions, which have been used successfully for years and reflect our classic strengths in out-put management. We will be focusing equally on batch processing and transactional and interactive communication.

Thorsten Meudt: With component-based architecture, we have set up a state-of-the-art technology that gives customers a very high degree of flexibility in deploying and operating solutions and components of the DocBridge® family. The microservices-based approach, which requires no client installations at all, is suitable for Any Premise, from a single server in the company's own data center to a fully orchestrated container solution at cloud service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft. At the same time, these microservices also incorporate the proven basic technology familiar from DocBridge® Mill Plus, for example. So we are confident we can take our almost 30 years of Compart into the future. That is why we see ourselves very well-positioned for the challenges ahead.

Thorsten Meudt: Because product management was already my responsibility, my team and I were already very involved in setting up the new architecture. It’s all the more reason for me to look forward to working even more closely with our development department. And I will continue to occasionally work hands-on with our consultants on projects in the field.