Interview with Christian Eder, Director Marketing, congatec
How do your product offerings fit into the world of smart factories and IIoT?
Our acquisition of Real-Time System brings software to our portfolio of boards and modules. Its hypervisor software for real-time virtual machines complements our edge and fog server offerings on the software level, creating the foundation for further OEM development and the design of highly-individualised heterogeneous edge servers and IIoT gateways. This real-time hypervisor software is a standalone product, and engineers can buy a license even without our products. Our OEM customers who need to add these IIoT gateways and cloud access to their products can do that if they want to offer new services that lead to new business models and monetisation opportunities.
In the future, congatec is also going to expand its offering by working with solution partners for vision, AI, VR, AR, medical, and dedicated edge computing services. Residing in the virtual machine configurations of fog servers, the latter provide IoT gateway and security functions for vulnerability, attack and anomaly detection, or cryptographic functions that are certified highest levels of security standards used in sensible applications.
What are your strategies going forward regarding automation?
One of our strategies is leveraging our partnerships to build a strong presence in verticals such as automation, communication, vision systems, medical, transportation, autonomous driving, critical infrastructures and so on. Customers from these verticals need application-ready platforms that simplify the use of embedded technologies, which is where our bundles with the hypervisor from Real-Time Systems, and our ecosystem of vision, safety and other platform solutions with partners such as are key.
Do you offer customised boards for clients?
For computer-on-module vendors such as us there are two parts to this answer because a system design needs a module and a carrier board for the module. As customers who utilise COMs always need a carrier, we provide this carrier if asked – either with partners or using our own resources. The latter are limited, of course, but any larger scale project is welcome.
Volume also plays a key role for the customisation of COMs. We have quite a few custom COM designs but this only makes sense if a customer requires high volumes. For such volumes, custom COM designs also tend to be realised as a COM-and-carrier fusion to make full-custom single board computer designs most efficient.
Being fabless, does congatec use local EMS or larger, global manufacturers?
Shortest time to market is key for us. To achieve this, we utilise smaller local manufacturers for quick prototype and trial production quantities, but we largely use global EMS manufacturers with the right technology expertise to meet the expectations our global customers in regards to supply chain integration, supply resilience and competitiveness. This setup allows to provide multi sourcing solutions to large customers in order to mitigate geopolitical and environmental risk.
We are currently experiencing something of “trade wars” – does this make congatec reconsider its manufacturing network?
We are at the competitive edge, with the added benefit of being a company focused on German quality standards. This high quality in design and production is a strong sales argument in all world regions. I am very happy that this is the case as it helped us to become a worldwide leading computer-on-modules (COMs) vendor. As for the Asia Pacific, our Asia Pacific headquarter is in Taiwan and we manufacture a significant share of our products in the region.
How do you attract talent?
Deggendorf is a small “Silicon Valley” for embedded computing and especially computer-on-modules – all European major COM vendors are located there. We have a technical university here too, which is excellent.
Germany has many smaller cities like Deggendorf with vendors focusing on a certain market – so not all business is done in Berlin, Hamburg or Munich. Other than that we take advantage of our international setup. We are hiring technical specialists also in our subsidiaries in US and Asia – we’re not limited to Germany only.
