WHEN IT GETS COMPLICATED, CALL SEEBURGER

Aligning IT technology and business is the only way for companies of all sizes and fields of operations to thrive. SEEBURGER knows how an organisation can achieve this. The company has developed a unified platform for integration that allows its customers to rapidly digitalise their business processes and fully integrate business partners of any size. So far, over 10,000 companies around the world have trusted SEEBURGER's solutions – and their number is growing. 

Impressively, one of SEEBURGER's core teams is located in Bulgaria – its entire cloud operation is managed from Sofia. The local team, however, is responsible for a lot more. Martin Kuntz, Chief Cloud Officer, elaborates. 

What is the biggest challenge that business integration faces nowadays? 

The companies should know that in the future there will be a dramatic shortage of IT staff. They will no longer have anyone to take care of their business integration, while the security, business and legal requirements and the complexity of business integration will increase. This will lead companies to move their entire business integration into the cloud. 

What is the philosophy of SEEBURGER on how to solve these problems? 

Cloud services are SEEBURGER's fastest growing and most profitable service nowadays. What sets us apart from our competitors are two special features. 

First, we do not rely on outside investors. We invest our own money and develop our own software. The result is our robust and powerful integration platform. Our Business Integration Suite combines many applications and allows a secure, continuous flow of information across the company business networks. The customer has access to all their data anywhere in real-time, enabling maximum process efficiency and control, on-premises or in the cloud. 

Secondly, SEEBURGER does not give its customers a blank platform that they have to configure and operate on themselves. We offer them a complete application operation and do everything for them. This is of value for small companies that lack IT people to do this properly. 

We give them a choice. They can decide which operating model they want and whether to operate the platform on premise, as a subscription or in a cloud of their choice, for example AWS or Google. Another option is our managed service where we do everything for them and provide 100% integration service. We also have a mixed model: the company decides which integration task it wants to perform itsself and which it wants to delegate to SEEBURGER.

What type of organisations can benefit from your solutions and services? 

SEEBURGER has 35 years of experience in business integration and we have been active in many verticals and many industries, such as automotive, retail, mechanical engineering, logistics, and financial services. We have many industry specific processes already in place. Our various readymade solutions make migration to our services very easy. Our ERP integration solutions are also excellent quality; we are a longtime SAP partner but also have expertise with other providers. 

In short, when it gets complicated, SEEBURGER comes into play. 

Are your services and solutions for corporations only or are they suitable for smaller businesses as well? 

The typical SEEBURGER customers are midrange companies and corporations, but we do not neglect small customers. For them we provide a range of low-cost starter solutions that do not force them to change their internal processes. Our portal-based WebEDI solutions, for example, ensure efficient electronic exchange and automatic processing of business documents. They help small companies to see their incoming orders, to access documents such as dispatch advices and invoices. Another solution allows extraction of data directly from PDF and the automatic creation of an electronic document. 

What motivated SEEBURGER to open a Bulgarian office as early as 1999? 

Good software developers were hard to find even in the 1990s and in those days SEEBURGER was going through a period of rapid growth. So, it started hiring students in Germany. One of those students was a Bulgarian. When he decided that he would return to Bulgaria, SEEBURGER followed him. This was the nucleus of our company in Sofia. We recognised that with well educated Bulgarians, who are also fluent in German, moving here might be the right thing to do. 

What has SEEBURGER Bulgaria achieved since then? 

We started with one person and now we have over 200 employees. SEEBURGER's entire cloud operation is completely managed from Bulgaria 24/7. We have a strong development department; it makes about one third of our employees in Bulgaria. The development department is organized in joint teams. The members of these teams are spread across the sites in Sofia, Plovdiv or Germany and work together on the same tasks, for example, the development of new adapters or connectors. This is our biggest achievement – a very reliable, good team here in Sofia. 

What defines SEEBURGER Bulgaria as an employer? 

The answer is that the talents in Sofia are treated the same way as their colleagues in Germany. We have over 10,000 on premise and 3,000 cloud customers. This diversity makes our work very interesting. If a person likes technology, if he wants to operate or take responsibility, this is a great place to work. 

How do you ensure the quality of your cloud services? 

The quality of our cloud services is due to our excellent Bulgarian team that takes care of them. The operation of our cloud services is aligned with ITIL. 

In the last couple of years we also got certified. Our data centres are ISO 207001 certified and our cloud operation team is ISAE 3402 certified. This documents the high quality of our cloud services and processes. Two years ago we also got TISAX® certified, a crucial certification for information security management in the automotive industry. It is one thing when I, as a manager, say that our Bulgarian team is good. But it is completely different when an outside company confirms this by its certification.

www.seeburger.bg