Lars Rückemann becomes new board member, Michael Hochgürtel steps down
It was announced for the first time at our internal company kick-off event at Phantasialand at the end of January (see 2nd image): On February 1st, codecentric AG expanded its board to include Lars Rückemann, long-standing location manager in Solingen and Head of Business Development. Lars Rückemann initially joined Rainer Vehns (co-founder and chairman), Ulrich Kühn and Michael Hochgürtel. Since then, he has been spearheading the topics of future viability and innovation. Michael Hochgürtel stepped down from his position at his own request in August, in order to be able to dedicate more time to other topics. He continues to advise the board, however.
Lars Rückemann is the new board member of codecentric AG.
Pre-Corona: The codecentric kick-off 2020
Startups with codecentric origins on the road to success
After CenterDevice and Instana, the third spin-off from an innovation project at codecentric emerged at the end of 2019 and the beginning of the year: Initially named "chaosmesh", the young company renamed itself "steadybit" a few months later and launched its brand new website. The three founders Benjamin Wilms, Johannes Edmeier and Dennis Schulte (see image) are fully committed to the topic of Chaos Engineering with the founding of steadybit – which also remains a core part of codecentric's service portfolio.
steadybit founding team. L to r: Benjamin Wilms, Johannes Edmeier, Dennis Schulte
In spring 2020, Instana celebrated its fifth anniversary and was also delighted to be included in Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" for Application Performance Monitoring. In autumn came the success story that surpassed all previous ones: Instana is being acquired by IBM. Instana's artificial intelligence (AI)-based APM (Application Performance Management) technology is set to expand the IT giant's hybrid cloud offering. Read more in our announcement.
Conferences
Amid all the head-shaking and complaining about 2020, it is easy to forget that the majority of the first quarter here in Germany still proceeded almost normally. So from January to March, we were still physically present at three conferences, before all further tech conferences migrated to the virtual space. The old normality still prevailed at OOP and the Code Days in Munich, the Entwicklertag Frankfurt and building IoT in Essen. The latter had already introduced meticulous hygiene rules and was the last in-person conference before the lockdown. Had we known that – we would probably have partied through the conference nights. ;)
building IoT 2020 on-site in Essen
But we were also there virtually – at data2day and Continuous Lifecycle. Even if the "real-life conference experience" with spontaneous hallway conversations, a focused audience and new encounters cannot be replaced by any conference tool in the world, it is still remarkable how quickly conference organizers adapted to the new situation and conjured up entirely new event concepts seemingly out of thin air. A big shout-out here to Heise, dpunkt.verlag and all the others who demonstrated exceptional event innovation during this time!
Our own and partner events
WomenTech Network
Fortunately, the WomenTech Network event at our new Plaza in Munich on February 26th still fell within the old normality.
The women's network advocates for gender diversity in the technology industry and connects talented and qualified professionals with top companies and disruptive startups that value diversity and inclusion. Attendees at the event had the opportunity to meet companies that value both innovation and inclusion.
Inauguration of Plaza Munich: Cancelled
It was supposed to be a grand celebration: The Munich location had invited guests for early March to the festive inauguration of the brand-new Plaza in Munich's Werksviertel, which had been moved into at the end of 2019. But already in February, the decision was wisely made to postpone the celebration indefinitely. We hope it can be made up for in 2021.
The first remote event
The first event that had to be quickly rescheduled to a hybrid remote event due to Corona was our "Meet the Experts" Day "DDD revisited in the Cloud Native Age with Vaughn Vernon" in March. We had just one week to change the setup, inform participants and speakers, etc. We still left it up to them whether they wanted to attend in person or remotely. It was the only right decision. And ultimately, we were very satisfied with how things went under the circumstances: Four speakers, seven talks and over 200 viewers at peak gave the Day a successful and interesting outcome, while also providing us with a first glimpse of what was yet to come.
The last workshop where we were all in one room
In mid-March, colleagues and clients from across locations met for what turned out to be the last time that year for a joint workshop: Alistair Cockburn came to Munich for the "Meet the Experts Masterclass" to introduce us to "Operating from the Heart of Agile". It was a thoroughly successful event that all participants greatly enjoyed.
Our first own remote conference
The first SoftwerkerKonf in June was a great success. Corona had by then firmly taken hold of Germany and the world, but we turned adversity into opportunity and decided that simply no longer hosting meetups and conferences was not a solution either. Ten talks, 14 speakers and over 800 participants confirmed it was more than worth the effort.
Webinars – all good things come in fours
Even before the big switch to remote working mode, at the beginning of February, we hosted our first webinar of 2020 on the topic of data science projects.
Two months later, webinar no. 2 followed on the topic of Chaos Engineering. In July, we joined forces with QAware to tackle the highly topical subject of "Remote IT".
In August, a fourth webinar followed on Industrial IoT in collaboration with our partner Lightbend. Three of the webinars can be viewed on demand at https://website-archive.codecentric.io/wissen/webinare. The "Remote IT" webinar is available on YouTube .
New and old friends
Speaking of partners: There were also quite a few developments here in 2020: In summer, codecentric joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program. As both a service and sales partner, we will be expanding our consulting and service offerings for our clients in areas such as hybrid cloud, machine learning and data analytics, as well as Kubernetes in particular.
codecentric AG has also established a network with Microsoft Azure. Good relationships now exist with all major cloud providers – Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
In autumn, two new partnership agreements followed with young, innovative startups in the (Industrial) IoT space: Infinite Devices from Magdeburg and Actyx from Munich. The cooperation with Infinite Devices, which focused on distance sensors and people counters in the first few months, is truly in tune with the times and was also featured in a video report by MDR, broadcast as part of the ARD theme week "Wie Leben" (How to Live).
Our long-standing partner Atlassian also made a major announcement in autumn: they announced the end of server licenses from February 2021. What this means for customers has been explained by our colleague Adrian Voigt in a blog post.
Anniversary
This year, two codecentric locations abroad celebrated their 10th anniversary: Serbia and the Netherlands. Serbia had planned a big celebration with many guests for June, which unfortunately had to be cancelled due to Corona.
We were at least able to ask the founders of codecentric Nederland for a joint interview with codecentric's CEO and co-founder Rainer Vehns, in which they reflected on the first decade.
By the way, codecentric AG turned 15 this year. We were unable to celebrate that properly either. However, on our Instagram channel we shared many nostalgic "throwback" moments from 15 years of codecentric throughout the year.
Stories from everyday project life
In May, we launched our new series "codecentric stories", in which we share stories from our everyday project work. Our colleagues regularly change their working environments and are on-site with our clients. In doing so, they gain interesting and enriching insights into the working methods, cultures, value systems and constellations of other companies. The wealth of experience built up and continuously developed in this way – covering both success factors and stumbling blocks in projects – is something we have rarely talked about until now. We want to change that going forward, because this information is incredibly useful – for ourselves, but also for our clients. The articles are intended to stimulate reflection and discussion; we take you on small journeys into the challenges of our time, as we see them at many companies.
Cloud on the rise
Cloud quality offensive
In 2020 as well, there was no way around the cloud in the context of digital transformation. To make our well-positioned team even more confident and to make its expertise transparent, the Nuremberg and Munich locations called on their employees to get officially certified by AWS. To this end, a first course on "Architecting on AWS" took place at the end of November, provided to us in full by AWS & Fastlane as part of our partnership. This allowed the participating colleagues to celebrate their official qualification as Solution Architects at the end of the year.
This year we also joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program (see section "New and old friends"). And with the planned inclusion in Microsoft's "Cloud Native Accelerate" initiative, we are adding the third major cloud provider, Microsoft Azure, to our portfolio.
Cloud Cost Cleanup – a spring clean for your cloud services
With the help of the cloud, companies can save a lot of money. However, it is important not to lose track of the various costs involved. That is why our team launched the Cloud Cost Cleanup in spring, which supports our clients remotely in reducing their cloud costs promptly and sustainably – preventing the cloud from becoming an unmanageable cost trap in the long run.
And the winner is ...
This year, we had the pleasure of having our work officially recognized on three separate occasions.
In April, we were delighted to receive the Red Hot Reseller Award 2019, presented by Atlassian Top Vendor "Appfire". The award is presented annually to software resellers in the Atlassian ecosystem that have achieved strong year-on-year growth and an outstanding sales volume.
In October, codecentric received a golden IT-AWARD in the category "Agile Coaching & Consulting". The winners were chosen through a reader survey on the online portals of Vogel IT-Medien.
Award ceremonies in times of Corona
In November, a non-profit project that codecentric employees from the Erfurt location had co-led pro bono was awarded the Digital and Open Source Prize Thuringia in the category "Open Source Solutions".
Softwerker – Corona-proof knowledge sharing
In 2020, we once again worked with great dedication on three issues of our free tech magazine, two of which have already been published. Vol. 14 had the motto "Digital Journeys" – the lockdown-induced wanderlust was already making itself felt in winter and spring. And thanks to Softwerker, readers could at least mentally venture into other (software) realms.
Vol. 15 bears – equally fitting for its creation in the midst of lockdown – the motto "Less is more". IT is becoming ever more complex and at the same time ever more ubiquitous and indispensable. But which of the many fancy frameworks are truly necessary? How can historically grown complexity be reduced? Contributions covering a wide range of IT topics shed some light on these questions.
The third issue of 2020 is expected to be released as a PDF before Christmas and as a printed edition in January 2021. It has a focus on deep learning and machine learning, but also contains worthwhile articles on a range of other topics. In other words: it will be an XXL edition with extra pages!
An overview of published issues can be found at https://website-archive.codecentric.io/wissen/softwerker.
codecentric 4 Charity
codecentric employees enjoy dedicating their 20% time to charitable causes. This year, not only were there further Charity Days (see Instagram posts on litter picking and catching signal crayfish in the Wupper); a Solingen local chapter was also founded for the charity initiative "Hey, Alter!" ("Hey, Old Timer!"), which originated in Braunschweig. The aim of the project is to provide needy pupils with old computers from companies and private individuals. The two founding members Sandy and Daniel share more about it in the interview.
Refurbishing old computers together: Hey, Alter! in Solingen
Sports
The Global Challenge – A fit start to 2020
Only a healthy team is a happy team – for this reason, we have been supporting the fitness and thus the resilience of our employees for years through various programmes, such as weekly back training and regular company runs.
In spring, we tried something special for the first time and took part in the Global Challenge organised by Virgin Pulse. Our team of nearly 100 colleagues recorded their daily activities using fitness trackers over 100 days – whether swimming, running, cycling or yoga – we gave it our all! In doing so, our 14 company teams collectively covered the equivalent of 82,129 km and ultimately secured 26th place out of 1,211 teams worldwide – congratulations!
Thomas on the treadmill in the Solingen office.
And 2021? We'll take it as it comes!
The truism that crises are also opportunities has proven true for many of us in 2020 in one way or another. Especially here in Germany and especially in the business environment, where long-term planning is the norm, the current uncertainty presents a challenge. The year has taught us humility and the ability to improvise, but has also shown us that we can master unexpected situations in the truest sense of the word – together with our valued clients and the community. Like society as a whole, we too are becoming experts in "Real-Life Chaos Engineering". Against the backdrop of the resilience we have gained and these – despite all the adversity – positive experiences, we look ahead to 2021 with great confidence.