Digitization winners

Seeburger is one of the pioneers of digitization. Already about 30 years ago, company founder Bernd Seeburger provided a DOS-based EDI solution that made it possible to automate the electronic exchange of data between companies and thus digitize business processes.

Today, various ingredients are needed to successfully implement digitization projects, but without appropriate business integration and seamless networking, they are still on shaky ground.

It is precisely in the areas of integration and networking that Seeburger sees himself in an excellent position.

"Seeburger sees itself as a driver of digital transformation, combined with the provision of solutions and services for business integration together with data and processes both on-premise and from the cloud"

explained Co-CEO Axel Haas at the start of an in-house exhibition held for customers in November, which focused on the topic of "digitalization.

The company used the event to give a brief summary of the three decades of company development and at the same time to look ahead.

30 years of stormy development

In particular, the path taken in the early/mid-1990s, namely to support customers - and here to a predominant extent SAP customers - very quickly with a holistic approach consisting of consulting, conception and implementation a complete automation of business processes and integration of business processes (into an ERP system), was followed by a stormy expansion.

The main aspect of this: covering the requirement to be able to transfer a large amount of data securely and automatically for handling business processes in structured form such as EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) or in unstructured form.

This includes tenders, quotations, order, delivery bill and invoice data, marketing data/price lists/design and drawing data, from customers or suppliers, data from a wide variety of applications/databases/web cloud applications/webshops.

And all of this tailored to the requirements of different industries (ten main industries at present) and taking into account all relevant data formats.

For this purpose, the company developed the Business Integration Suite, or BIS for short. As middleware, it represents a comprehensive platform/data hub for the automated exchange of data with different data formats and the integration of business processes.

In addition, in-house developed BIS-related applications based on Abap were added for further processing/creation in SAP: for example, for the order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay processes or for monitoring and workflow tasks.

All of these can be used on-premise, as cloud services with provisioning by the company's own cloud data center, or as a hybrid model.

The company is continuously expanding its range of cloud services. Seeburger's customer base now includes over 10,000 companies/organizations.

Seeburger, headquartered in Bretten, Germany, has long been active worldwide, in America as well as in Asia and practically in all European countries.

The company currently employs more than 750 people at its various locations around the globe.

And the end of the line is still a long way off in terms of expansion.

Another data center location (in addition to Karlsruhe and Shanghai) is to go into operation soon in Atlanta (USA).

New opportunities

For Seeburger, digitization in particular represents the justified prospect of achieving a renewed growth spurt.

Michael Kleeberg, Co-CEO:

"New processes or additional sub-processes with which companies push their digitization projects mean additional opportunities or simply additional business for us."

In his view, Seeburger's BIS is "ideally positioned for digitization with its immense coverage of requirements. The fact that BIS is based on the same universal technology base, which is continuously being expanded to include new features, has proven its worth.

Unlike some companions. Many buy up start-ups, for example. And different technologies then have to be connected afterwards, which usually causes problems."

As part of the in-house exhibition, the company also focused on the current BIS version 6.5 with new features. Core elements as pillars with far-reaching functionality here: B2B/EDI (business-to-business) integration, MFT (managed file transfer) integration and EAI/API (application programming interface) integration including management features for near-real-time and real-time use in the digitalization age.