One of the oldest software companies in Europe - if not in the word - purely founded for the purpose of software as a business, is Software AG in Germany. Unlike some older companies, Software AG never dabbled into anything hardware - but only focused on software for its 40+ years in existence.
Software AG was founded in Darmstadt, Germany by 6 members of a local consulting firm, not even 30 miles north of the more prominent other German software company's location, Walldorf (SAP (AG)). But it was too early for business software, so the Software AG founders focused on building the tools that were needed at the time, zeroing in on a database, that was supposed to be adaptable, so in 1971 the company launched adabas (you guess it - adaptable database system). It prove to be quite successful in the banking and insurance areas and along came the need to establish a programming language, that the founders wanted to make more easy to use and learn than the other programming languages on the market. In 1979 the company delivered natural as a 4GL application development environment - an easy to learn programming language that supported both procedural and event driving programming.
In the 90ies the company extended it product range and most notably had partnerships with SAP (yes - a cheaper database option was even then a topic of interest) and Microsoft (porting of DCOM to other platforms than Windows).
Later the company established a fondness of all things XML, which despite very high marks on the usability and lowered cost of ownership aspects of its products, never really took off and put the company in the doldrums to a certain extent.
Reshaping Strategy
In 2007 Software AG acquired webmethods - and with that focusing more on the integration aspects of software than it's creation, which in hindsight - and the 2013 perspective - provided to be pretty pivotal. Equally the acquisition of IDS Scheer AG with its Aris modelling tool was a key addition to is products and services portfolio. When Software AG was looking at a way to accelerate slow running business processes it acquired Terracotta - a leader of in memory caching technology. All that formed a very good base for growth at Software AG.
The latest
While the company still provides adabas and natural, the main focus has been on integration and creation of high value, real-time and highly complex processes. Software AG picked more acquisitions in 2013 to complement this strategy, acquiring the CEP platform Apama from Progress, realizing the need for better visualization acquiring Jackbe and improving the agility of integration to webmethods with Longjump. And finally there is ambition to play in the IT transformation market with the acquisition of alphabet AG. It will be interesting what the company will unveil at their upcoming user conference in early October in San Francisco.
MyPOV
It's remarkable to have a 40+ year run in the software industry. Inevitably there will be success and failure, but with the right degree of innovation and re-inventing itself, Software AG has become one of the key players in the upcoming cloud integration game.
But the game has not changed - and we do not see it changing with the cloud - that integration vendors have to create value and not simply be a point to point connection protocol. Here the cloud is an opportunity for all of them - not just Software AG - to more easily create value added services on top of the pure integration data streams.
