Milestones in the History of Software How a Cooperative Engineering Platform Redefines Integration

Software developer Aucotec is only around 30 years old, but in the company's young history it has already achieved a number of milestones. Earlier than anyone else, the Hanover-based company backed database technology and object-oriented programming and developed Engineering Base, one of the most state-of-the-art engineering tools currently available. In time for Achema 2018, Aucotec brought EB up to speed for Industry 4.0 and thus catapulted itself to the forefront of this development.

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The times in which engineering software was used for plant planning and then disappeared in a drawer are long past. In the age of Industry 4.0 operators expect more — efficient management of the planning, operation, maintenance, and servicing of plants across their entire lifecycle.

Of course, when the two Aucotec co-founders Horst Beran and Lex Bedijs started thinking about their first software developments in the mid-1980s, these types of demands were not yet on anybody’s minds.

Despite this, they laid the foundations for the success of the company with the development of Elcad, a tool for planning electrical engineering components in machines and systems. The two already recognized the value of integrating their solutions in the Windows environment — long before anybody else was really able to predict quite the level of success that Windows-based systems would go on to enjoy.

Today, some 34 years later, the topic of integration is absolutely key to survival, and 60 Aucotec developers are now working on Industry 4.0 capable high-tech solutions with cloud and web connectivity.

Selected Milestones in the History of Software

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But the starting signal for one of the most modern engineering tools that is currently on the market already came in 1999, when Aucotec was one of the first CAD companies to use database technology and object-oriented programming.

Just five years later the company produced its flagship Engineering Base (EB) solution, which set new standards with its open architecture and anticipated the demand for things like integrated engineering workflows, standardization and integration.

Meanwhile, almost 80 % of new business was accounted for by the Engineering Base software platform — with orders doubling in the last six years and turnover rising by nearly 80 %. In 2015, Aucotec celebrated its 30^th anniversary and the platform took the evolutionary step to web services and web-based applications for mobile clients.

This represented the transformation of EB into a cooperative engineering platform with an integrated data model that permitted genuinely collaborative working. Today, EB is the only system that combines all the core disciplines in a universal data model using just one database, which means that Engineering Base (EB) has completely redefined the concept of integration.

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