Uli Kreutzer
Press
27.02.2024 | Press Release
Three decades have come and gone since ITK Engineering’s inception in Kuhardt, a village in the Rhineland-Palatinate state of Germany. The startup went on to achieve impressive growth in the space of just a few years. Today, the company is one of the leading digital engineering companies, employing around 1,300 people worldwide.
A year of many milestone achievements, 1994 saw the QR code’s invention, Deutsche Bahn’s founding, and Michael Schumacher’s Formula 1 world championship title, a first for a German. It also figures prominently in ITK Engineering’s history: the tech company was established that year. This year, ITK is celebrating its 30th anniversary. “We are proud of our company’s history and its impressive rise from a small startup to an internationally established digital engineering partner,” says CEO Dr. Frank Schmidt. “With our wide-ranging methods-driven expertise covering everything from embedded systems to cloud computing and artificial intelligence, we provide customized solutions to highly complex technological problems.”
Back in 1994 when Michael Englert founded the Ingenieurbüro für Technische Kybernetik in Kuhardt, a Rhineland-Palatinate town near Karlsruhe, he set up shop in a 25-square-meter basement office. His vision was to develop software and systems that would instill intelligence in vehicles and equipment. What started out as a one-man operation gradually expanded to become a small team of enthusiastic engineers, mostly control systems specialists.
The fledgling enterprise landed its first projects for customers in the automotive and aerospace industries. The small business soon grew bigger. ITK Engineering set up its first subsidiary, the Ingenieurbüro für Technische Kybernetik mbH, in 2001 at Marburg. A year later, another new site opened in Munich. The company continued to focus on building system and software architectures to solve complex problems for customers in various industries. ITK Engineering also blazed the trail in model-driven development. Another milestone followed in 2017 when Robert Bosch GmbH acquired ITK Engineering as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Innovative methods and technologies have been the driving force behind ITK Engineering from the very beginning, but the company’s unique culture has also been important. “I joined ITK in the year 2000 as employee number seven,” says Christian Hötterges, who today heads up the Electromobility division. “For many years, all of us at ITK knew each other – we were colleagues and friends in equal measure. Thirty years on, the company has grown tremendously, but we continue to embrace our values of community spirit and solidarity. They are part of who we are.”
To this day, the highly skilled and motivated engineering workforce remains the cornerstone of the company’s success. In 2006, ITK Engineering had 104 employees. By 2014, that number had grown to 740. Today, the company’s workforce is 1,300 strong. Employees work with customers in a wide range of sectors, from automotive and rail engineering to medical systems and manufacturing. “It’s unlikely that anyone in the mid-’90s would have expected ITK Engineering to experience this kind of growth and success,” says Schmidt.
ITK Engineering GmbH has been headquartered in Ruelzheim in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate since 2013. The company has nine other locations throughout Germany and five abroad in China, Japan, Austria, Spain, and the USA. “Our teams have become more diverse over the years with this impressive campaign to go global. Exactly that is one of our great strengths – the ability to collaborate with people of different personal and cultural backgrounds on an equal footing across different locations,” says CFO Jens Hofmann.
We are proud of our company’s history and its impressive rise from a small startup to an internationally established digital engineering partner.
Frank Schmidt, CEO (left), Jens Hofmann, CFO (right)
“We have always worked with digital methods. Our core competence is digital engineering – that combination of computer and engineering sciences,” says Schmidt. ITK Engineering builds customized, platform-independent systems and software solutions. Rather than focusing narrowly on individual components, the company makes the most of digital tools and methods, collaborating across domains to keep its eye on the big-picture prize, the overall system. Having mastered methods across diverse lines of business, the enterprise provides the full range of software development services for embedded systems, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. This is also reflected in the company’s new credo: ITK. The Art of Digital Engineering. “It describes our exceptional approach to complex challenges,” says Schmidt. “We get creative to come up with unique solutions tailored to the use case – something beyond the ordinary and above the standard.” The company has been doing this for 30 years now.
