ECM is one the top ten high-tech topics right now, as the Bitkom industry barometer 2018 reports. And SER has profited immensely from this. The SER Group, an international ECM vendor, attained a solid 67 million euros in overall revenue. Offering software "Made in Germany", its customers are primarily large mid-sized firms, corporations, organizations and administrations. The strong revenue figure equates to a significant growth increase of 9.4% compared to 2016. The operating result (EBITDA) also grew at an equally profitable rate of 9.0%. One reason for the very positive development is SER's licensing business, which increased by 25% compared to the previous year. Solidifying its market leadership, the SER Group continued to expand its customer portfolio with 50 new customers with primarily large installations. These new customers come from a wide range of industries.

New international big-name customers

Many big-name companies joined SER's customer list in 2017, for example: LIXIL in the US, EDP in Portugal (cloud), TDK EPCOS in Hungary, the Vienna Insurance Group (VIG) and BGZ BNP Paribas in Poland, R+V Allgemeine Versicherung in Luxembourg, the Trelleborg Group (Europe-wide), Ferrari Financial Services, and Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany, plus a major international airplane manufacturer with 60,000 users. "As a premium vendor, we constantly focus on innovation and quality. This pays off in the long-term and is reflected in our long-standing customer relationships," says Kurt-Werner Sikora, CEO of the SER Group. Well over half of the customers have had a successful business relationship with the SER Group for 10 or more years now. About half of them have been working with SER for 15 years or longer.

Leader in development and service

SER's software development is a key component of the company's success. As an owner-run software vendor, SER has continuously been investing more than one-fourth of its software and maintenance earnings in research and development. This covers everything from maintaining and updating the existing Doxis4 software to establishing cooperations with university institutions. With 180 product, solution and project developers, SER has the largest ECM development team in Europe. This trove of human resources and capabilities ensures SER's technological edge, which the company has built over the past 34 years with its ECM expertise. The SER Group is a driver of future trends such as the interaction between ECM, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence (AI).

Coinciding with the growth in licensing business, service business has also jumped by over 11%. As a result, the Professional Services team was increased by 25% to a total of 225 employees. This means that SER has the largest and highest performing Professional Services team for enterprise content management in German-speaking countries. SER works together with 53 consulting and implementation partners from across the globe. With a team of 550 employees, the SER Group operates out of 22 international locations.

Visionary and Strong Performer

Doxis4 has a competitive market advantage due to the fact that it brings together ECM, BPM, collaboration and EFSS onto one unified technological platform with uniform metadata management. Doxis4 software also offers added value in its design-and-build approach, which enables SER, its customers and partners to create their own applications and adapt them as needed. The flexibility to run Doxis4 on premises, in the cloud or as a hybrid makes the company-wide content services platform stand out in the market.

For all of these reasons, renowned market analysts and leaders of the ECM and IT industry have recognized the SER Group. The SER Group is a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms** (CSP). Forrester Research has named the SER Group a "Strong Performer" in its Waves for ECM Transactional Content Services*** and ECM Business Content Services****. SER is the only German vendor listed in the ECM Waves.
 
Pioneer in security

SER is a pioneer when it comes to security: Already in 2017, the renowned auditing firm Ebner Stolz certified Doxis4 according to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Doxis4 was the first ECM system worldwide to receive this certification. Furthermore, also in 2017, Doxis4 was the first ECM system worldwide to receive SAP S/4HANA certification for the archive interfaces ArchiveLink and ILM.

Continuing the positive growth track

The SER Group anticipates that 80% of its revenue in the next four to five years will be generated by satisfied repeat customers. With this stability, the ongoing digitalization trend and potential new business from migrating customers, the company will continue on its growth track.


¹ According to the German digital association Bitkom, the ECM market grew 4.5% more than in 2016.
*SER is the number one European ECM vendor according to the most recently published figures on revenue, gross profits, operating results and number of employees.
**The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms 2017: Karen A. Hobert, Michael Woodbridge, Joe Mariano, Gavin Tay, October 5, 2017. MQ for download from Gartner
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*** The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management — Transactional Content Services, Q2 2017. Our Evaluation Of 13 Vendors In A Market In Transition by Cheryl McKinnon with Alex Cullen, Alex Kramer, and Sam Bartlett, April 5, 2017.
The Forrester Wave™: ECM – Transactional Content Services
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**** The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management — Business Content Services, Q2 2017. Our Evaluation Of 15 Vendors In A Market In Transition, by Cheryl McKinnon with Alex Cullen, Madeline King, Sam Bartlett, April 5, 2017.
The Forrester Wave™: ECM – Business Content Services
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