In July 1994, Dieter Hess and Manfred Werner founded 3S-Smart Software Solutions GmbH, which has been CODESYS GmbH since June 2020 and is now part of the CODESYS Group as a sales company. The entire group of companies now employs more than 230 people at its headquarters in Kempten/Allgäu and in its branches in China, Italy and the United States.
In the 30 years since its market launch, CODESYS has put the automation industry on a completely new footing. The independent Kempten-based company now offers the complete software side of automation, far beyond the functionality of a modern IEC 61131-3 tool, from integrated visualization and connection to all important fieldbus systems to motion and safety. The CODESYS Automation Server is an Industry 4.0 solution that allows control landscapes to be managed conveniently and remotely.
Brand new in the portfolio: CODESYS Virtual Control SL. This virtual controller can be installed on any architecture with a container or hypervisor / VM – as often as required and with scalable performance. This makes it possible to create virtual controllers that are equipped with all the known properties of CODESYS and are programmed with the CODESYS Development System in the languages of IEC 61131-3. Another innovation is the web-based development environment CODESYS go!. It makes development with CODESYS independent of Windows desktops. Because CODESYS go! also runs on the server and on the controller.
“Our continuity is one of our great strengths,” says Manfred Werner. “It is essential in an industry in which product lifespans are measured in decades.” In fact, all of the employees who were there from the very beginning are still employed by the CODESYS Group. Even the customers who placed their first order by fax in 1994 are still loyal to CODESYS today.
And what are the prospects for the future? Dieter Hess believes that automation is a key factor both in the necessary energy transition and in alleviating the labor shortage. “While our industry was previously denounced as a job killer, it now offers the opportunity to at least partially compensate for a lack of personnel through productivity increases.” CTO Hilmar Panzer adds: “What we need worldwide is intelligent management for the distribution, storage, transport and consumption of energy. CODESYS is already making an important contribution to this.”