Dr. Julian Feinauer of Pragmatic Industries knows about the industry's problems. "Margins in new business are low, the service business has not yet been developed at many smaller providers, digital services are often a foreign word, and there is a lack of manpower to develop new revenue drivers." In addition, he says, his customers often don't find themselves on the platforms of the big providers. "They are looking for their own ways." The approach of the mathematician and his team: to give small and medium-sized machine builders the opportunities to develop a platform for their customers - as a service, in other words.

"For us, PaaS means that we provide companies with a turnkey platform that they can use directly. The platform is installed and preconfigured and can then be further individualized by customers and adapted to their own needs and processes," assures the founder. The machine builder can then offer applications and digital services on this platform or open up the platform to other providers of software solutions. Feinauer and his team also deliver applications to customer platforms running on an IONOS Cloud. "In the end, the machine builder can increase his sales and earnings," promises Feinauer. He also gains knowledge about the use of his machines in the field and can improve his own development as a result.

Isn't a machine builder more likely to trust a large provider than a young, 40-person team? "Open source is our argument." You couldn't develop such platforms ("with tolerable effort") if there weren't so many components and libraries that were free to use, Pragmatic Industries says. "In a way, open source provides a democratization of IT, because it allows young (smaller) companies like us to develop such complex platforms, which would otherwise be the preserve of large IT companies," Feinauer reports. "And if we go bankrupt, the customer can be sure that the platform can continue to operate," the CEO jokes. "That is an advantage that should not be underestimated."