“Open standards are the key”: AmpereSoft celebrates successful decade in the CAE market
AmpereSoft GmbH is celebrating its tenth birthday these days. Without question a proud age for a software company. Since the company was founded, AmpereSoft has experienced and helped shape many trends and technical developments. In this article we look back and show important milestones in the company’s history so far.
There are certainly companies in whose history a period of ten years seems like the blink of an eye. But to have been successful in the market for a decade in the relatively young software industry makes us at AmpereSoft quite proud. It all started at the end of 2007, when we went into business for ourselves with AmpereSoft. By then, the other founders and I had already been employed for many years at Elektrotechnik Moeller GmbH – organised in the “Competence Center Engineering” team. So our industry know-how goes back much further than just the founding of AmpereSoft: we have already been involved for over 20 years.
Of course, the step into self-employment presented completely different challenges. Of course, the opportunity arose to launch numerous innovations that had not been feasible before. However, until then we only had to focus on the needs of one company when developing our CAE tools. Now our solutions should offer decisive added value to all users of CAE software.
Politics influences the market: How the TemperatureCalculator came into being
The genesis of our TemperatureCalculator solution is particularly interesting here. It shows how political decisions can influence market development: When the European standard DIN EN 61439 came into force in 2014 and regulated the safety requirements for low-voltage switchgear, the uncertainty among switch cabinet planners was palpable. Above all, the precisely specified documentation obligations presented many engineers with an enormous challenge. With the TemperatureCalculator, we reacted to the new situation at that time and developed a tool that not only automatically carries out the heat calculation within a switchgear, including all the required variables. The solution also implements the complicated documentation proofs without the user’s intervention.
Our powerful, modular tool system, which is complemented by seamlessly integrated special solutions such as the TemperatureCalculator, is probably the most important factor in AmpereSoft’s success. At the heart of the system is the detailed engineering tool ProPlan and the integrated special solutions automate flanking processes of the engineering process. For example, the time-consuming cost calculation of projects or the creation of tenders.
Another success factor is our consistent orientation towards international markets. Because the market in Germany was just as saturated back then, when AmpereSoft was founded, as it still is today. Newcomers had a hard time getting past the big established providers in this country. We made a virtue out of necessity and from the beginning also turned our attention to foreign markets.
Open standards as enablers for Industry 4.0
The decision for constant internationalisation was the right one and opened the door to our success. In the meantime, our tools are used by users from 90 different nations. Such a diversified market naturally demands standards. That is why we have been working for years to establish and further develop ECLASS Advanced, the cross-industry standard for product data. Only open standards like this make it possible for CAE processes to function smoothly across country and location borders – and independently of the software used. Such product data includes, for example, essential information such as length dimensions or material properties such as behaviour under heating. Only with this information are fully automated production processes possible.
The profit generated with Industrie 4.0 is growing from year to year. Nevertheless, the economic potential of Industrie 4.0 can only be fully exploited when all product data is available in an open standard. Take production with the help of robots, for example: One of our customers is already taking over position data automatically in the robot-assisted production of its products and is thus demonstrating how the smart factory can become reality – provided the necessary information is available in an open standard. If this additional information is only available in an unstructured form, it is still necessary for humans to collect it manually and enter it into the software of the production robots.
Thanks to users and staff
The past ten years have been a successful time for AmpereSoft. Our thanks go to our users, whom we are privileged to accompany and who are important partners for us in constructive exchange. We would also like to thank our employees in all departments, without whom our success story would not have been possible. So we look forward to the coming years with confidence and excitement.
