25 years of otris software AG – an innovative success story with consistency

The dawn – betting on the right tech­no­logy

1992 – Fol­low­ing their pro­fess­or’s vision for a novel, object-ori­ented soft­ware tech­no­logy, two en­thu­si­ast­ic doc­tor­al stu­dents who met through their shared in­terest in the just-emer­ging Linux op­er­at­ing system at Ruhr Uni­ver­sity Bochum bring the product to life within a few years. They put their faith in a forward-looking tech­no­logy, founded a company during their aca­dem­ic careers and launched the soft­ware, which in turn can gen­er­ate com­pletely ex­ecut­able ap­plic­a­tions in­clud­ing data­base in­ter­faces: the soft­ware gen­er­at­or JANUS.

The name JANUS, bor­rowed from the Roman god of be­gin­nings and endings, could hardly be more ap­pro­pri­ate. After all, it de­scribes the basic idea of har­mon­ising the initial tech­nic­al con­cepts with the final soft­ware ap­plic­a­tion. When you hear about soft­ware that itself gen­er­ates soft­ware, the idea of a per­petu­al motion machine comes to mind, but it is not that simple. Con­stant re­search and further de­vel­op­ment improve the soft­ware more and more and finally show the great po­ten­tial that JANUS has with regard to the gen­er­a­tion of stand­ard soft­ware.

The wild years – otris es­tab­lishes itself

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A wild but cre­at­ive time follows. The young team around Dr. Chris­toph Niemann and Dr. Frank Hofmann, sup­ple­men­ted by their stu­dents at the time, who are now also main­stays of the company, con­stantly improve JANUS, but also develop soft­ware de­vel­op­ment tools on this basis. For example, the suc­cess­ful ECM plat­form DOC­U­MENTS. With the help of this soft­ware, all of a company’s doc­u­ments can be stored on a central server, struc­tured, managed and used via web access, re­gard­less of loc­a­tion. Thanks to DOC­U­MENTS OEM partner dis­tri­bu­tion, the product can be easily adapted to the cor­por­ate design of part­ners and dis­trib­uted by them. In this way, more than 5,000 DOC­U­MENTS in­stall­a­tions have been real­ised within a few years.

Based on this pro­pri­et­ary plat­form, otris now offers soft­ware suites with 11 spe­cial­ist solu­tions that can be used via the cloud. otris soft­ware has firmly es­tab­lished itself in the market for digital solu­tions for legal, com­pli­ance and data pro­tec­tion man­age­ment. Whether otris con­tract for con­tract man­age­ment, otris privacy in data pro­tec­tion or otris com­pli­ance with a digital whis­tleblower system as well as a solu­tion for the im­ple­ment­a­tion of the Supply Chain Act (LkSG). The origin, the de­vel­op­ment method of the basic plat­form de­veloped 30 years ago, is still the valid stand­ard!

The otris family and its values

So now, 25 years after the spin-off on 15 June 1998, the two former stu­dents find them­selves, not en­tirely without pride, as board members with doc­tor­ates in their own “quasi-family busi­ness”. Sur­roun­ded by many, un­usu­ally long-stand­ing com­pan­ions, of whom more than 30 are dir­ectly or in­dir­ectly in­volved in otris. This is also the reason for the 100% otris feeling that pre­vails in the company. More than 100 fam­il­ies can make a good living from the company, which has several sub­si­di­ar­ies with com­ple­ment­ary service of­fer­ings, such as the cloud experts of bytemine GmbH. The team of spe­cial­ists is rounded off by the diverse mix of train­ees, dual stu­dents and young pro­fes­sion­als.

The co­he­sion at otris is also ap­pre­ci­ated by the cus­tom­ers. Ac­cord­ing to this, in ad­di­tion to the un­doubted in­nov­at­ive strength and the ability to develop solu­tion-ori­ented soft­ware, the sup­posed soft factors such as re­li­ab­il­ity and con­sist­ency are also highly valued by them. Here, too, the long-stand­ing part­ner­ships are proof of this.

Looking to the future

otris is lit­er­ally fit for the future. The tech­nic­al evol­u­tion of the DOC­U­MENTS plat­form will be com­plete with the im­min­ent release of doc­u­ment­sOS. To­geth­er with the natural ex­pan­sion of the cloud busi­ness, the two board members and their team draw much of their mo­tiv­a­tion and en­joy­ment from the vision of con­tinu­ally de­vel­op­ing new, future-ori­ented ap­plic­a­tions for their cus­tom­ers. The goal is more than ever to build soft­ware solu­tions to help cus­tom­ers fulfil their re­spons­ib­il­it­ies more easily, not to say play­fully.

Because that is exactly what otris does: otris soft­ware sim­pli­fies re­spons­ib­il­ity.