I have been building several successful teams over the last years that were creative, innovative and worked in an inspired cooperative way. My main goal was developing new markets and products including the creation and execution of go-to-market strategies, securing partnerships and building scalable teams. Products that we started are still best in class today.

To achieve this it is important to have a clear understanding of software development technologies and procedures. Working closely with engineering on design decisions is vital to create a scalable, maintainable and expandable software architecture that can form the basis of a product family or a platform product.

I am seeing product development not only as an engineering task but as a cross departmental effort that allows a company to build great products instead of great devices.

Great companies are not just a little better in a few ways, they are significantly better in one way that is important to the customer. (from William H. Davidow)

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Kofax Inc, Irvine (USA)
2006-2011 VP Transformation Software

Kofax plc (LSE: KFX) is the leading provider of Intelligent Capture Solutions, providing application software and OEM/POS software worldwide. For more than 20 years, Kofax has provided award-winning solutions that automate document-driven business processes by managing the capture, transformation and exchange of business-critical information arising in paper, fax and electronic formats in a more accurate, timely and cost-effective manner.

The software development process of a complex product over several locations requires significant management attention and clear processes. From the beginning we introduced agile development as our common practice – assuring a feature driven development in interacting groups while at the same time providing the base for sound reporting to management.

Document recognition (Transformation) is a market growing very dynamically. Frequent releases and innovation were achieved by an inspired the team that took over responsibility and participated in the attempt to keep the leading edge on technology.

During this time the net revenue of transformation products grew to make Kofax the market leader for document recognition technology in the world in 2010 (according to Harvey Spencer Associates).

LCI Learning Computers International, Kirchzarten (Germany)
2002-2006 CEO and Founder

LCI was founded by Pal Rujan and me in the middle of the breakdown of the new stock market in 2002. The focus of the company was defined as providing software components and products for automation and recognition mimicking the human cognitive abilities. Consequently the software was built on learning intelligent algorithms. From the beginning the focus of the business was to provide these components to other companies in an OEM model.

In 2006 LCI was acquired by Dicom (now Kofax) and became an integral part of their organization

SER AG, Neustadt/ Wied (Germany)
1999 – 2002 VP Document Recognition

SER was one of the stars at the “New Market” in Frankfurt. Specialized on Document Management Systems SER was known as the largest independent software vendor in this fast growing field in Germany. SER expanded into Europe and US and employed more than 2.000 persons in the peak. In 2002 SER suffered from the breakdown of the stock markets and defaulted.

I was responsible as VP of Document Recognition for the complete data capture and document recognition products.  With my team we created the first complete free form invoice recognition solution in the market which was sold very successfully. The product (SERdistiller at that time) is still sold today.

Integrating neural network and online learning technology from the research group led the way to a shift in paradigm how document recognition is setup – which hence has established itself as a standard in this area.

Improx, Kirchzarten (Germany ) and Vienna (Austria)
1997 – 1999 Engineering Manager

Improx is a software company focused on automating document and forms recognition. Improx headquarter is in Vienna, Austria. Improx was very successful in a partner oriented business, selling their application through the channel.  Improx was sold to an output management company “Isis Papyrus” in 1999.

Parsytec, Aachen (Germany)
1997 Director of Document Recognition

Parsytec was focused at that time on parallel computing (Parallele System Technik) based on transputer technology. Parsytec was able to build a parallel system with 1024 cores back in 1997. One application that lended itself to this unknown computing power at that time was full text document recognition.
We built first industry ready full text document recognition system that was deployed to big financial institutions in Germany. In 1997 Parsytec made a decision to focus on industrial surface inspection an area where they are very successful today.

IP Systeme, Kirchzarten, Germany
1993 – 1997 Engineering Team Lead and Development Manager

IP Systeme is a small local company that is specialized on automating banking processes. We created one of the first purely software based production image processing system. Before that OCR applications were based on hardware (like AEG Schriftenleser). The second challenge we mastered was the transition from MS-DOS  to an object oriented new version for OS/2 and Windows based on IBM Visual Age.

EDUCATION

PhD in  Physics, Albert-Ludwig Universität Freiburg, 1993
Computer simulation and experiments of laser assisted molecular collisions

M.S Physics and Mathematics (Diplom),
Albert-Ludwig Universität Freiburg, 1989
Thesis on laser spectroscopy of sodium molecules

Received “Gustav-Mie Award” for the best thesis in physics of this year.