Fiscal year 2021: SoftProject GmbH looks back on a positive year

“The trend is clearly moving further in the direction of ‘renting software instead of buying it’,” says Dirk Detmer, founder and managing director of SoftProject GmbH. “Customers particularly appreciate the rapid availability of services with little installation effort, without having to sacrifice quality and security.” Detmer is also pleased with the 35 percent increase in recurring revenue from rental models, maintenance contracts and provision of software as a service (SaaS), which indicates consistent customer relationships. Recurring revenue thus accounts for around 40 percent of total revenue. The strong demand for X4 systems to run on open source and container technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker shows that more and more companies are looking at building their own cloud using the low-code X4 BPMS platform. The topic of DevOps continued to gain in importance in 2021, with the possibility of building DevOps pipelines for digitization projects using the features of X4 BPMS and the low-code approach.

In 2021, SoftProject GmbH concluded numerous new partnerships. These include companies from a wide range of industries, such as Capgemini in the insurance sector, PSI in the utilities sector, or overarching partnerships with industry experts such as viadico, which created the “bAV digital” product based on X4 BPMS to digitize processes in company pension plans. “We are proud to have convinced numerous renowned companies to cooperate with us and our low-code platform X4 BPMS and to have won them as partners,” says Markus Notheis, responsible for business development at SoftProject GmbH. In joint projects, it has been possible to bring new digital products and services to the market and to jointly develop new customers. In 2022, the partner business is to be further strengthened and expanded in terms of personnel as part of the corporate strategy.

Another highlight in 2021 was the 7.0 release of the X4 BPMS (Business Process Management Software) digitization platform in September. Under a new name, the developers of X4 BPMS (formerly X4 Suite) presented new functional and convenient enhancements with a focus on the topics of BPM, DevOps, and the low-code approach. This means that even sophisticated web applications can be implemented quickly and easily without programming and without knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, or CSS. Employees thus become citizen developers who can quickly and easily implement processes without programming and thus accelerate digitization. One example of this is the development of customer portals with X4 Web Apps, where the data entered is transferred directly to the modeled processes for automated processing.

With the establishment of a new business unit in the fall of 2021, SoftProject GmbH intends to accelerate the sale of digitization and automation solutions in industry based on the low-code platform X4 BPMS. The offering includes, for example, adapters that connect manufacturing systems, workers’ monitors for order processing and the integration of distributed manufacturing sites into the central processes of an industrial company. In the current year, SoftProject plans to further expand its services and the use of the low-code platform X4 BPMS and to increasingly accelerate digitization projects in other industries. The first projects in the financial sector will start as early as the beginning of 2022.