Lack of job and plan­ning secur­ity, hardly any liquid­ity reserves, miss­ing cash cows, far-reach­ing upheavals in busi­ness pro­cesses, con­stant chan­ging employees…these buzzwords describe com­pan­ies in crisis – or a start-up. Seen in this light, our under­stand­ing of “crisis” is per­haps some­what dif­fer­ent than that of most com­pan­ies. The cur­rent change in per­son­al cir­cum­stances as a res­ult of Cov­id-19 is just one of many new situ­ations in recent months.  We are try­ing to respond appro­pri­ately to it.

Our IT infra­struc­ture runs com­pletely in the Het­zn­er data cen­ter in the beau­ti­ful Vogt­land region. From the very begin­ning, we have used only laptops as hard­ware. There­fore, tech­nic­ally noth­ing stands in the way of longer hours worked at home. The under­ly­ing work­ing meth­ods, for example with tick­ets and wikis in the devel­op­ment and pro­ject man­age­ment soft­ware Red­mine, are also estab­lished through many busi­ness trips and the part-time work­ing mod­els of some Peers.

With regard to our cus­tom­er pro­jects, hardly any restric­tions are to be expec­ted at present either. All pilot install­a­tions of MADDOX are access­ible through secured VPN con­nec­tions.  The install­a­tions can be fur­ther advanced through updates and con­tent. Since we rely on cloud-based SIP tele­phony, we can still be reached under the usu­al phone num­bers. Only planned on-site appoint­ments will have to be can­celled until fur­ther notice, as travel is cur­rently not possible.

The post­pone­ment of Inter­pack 2020 has freed up a lot of our pre­vi­ously alloc­ated intern­al resources. As co-exhib­it­or we would have been rep­res­en­ted with well-known part­ners on three stands. We have already respon­ded to this situ­ation by adjust­ing our devel­op­ment roadmap. In order to that we can focus on many oth­er tasks which had been put on hold. We expect to be able to deliv­er new and improved MADDOX fea­tures earli­er than ori­gin­ally planned.

These, along with oth­er examples such as the optim­ized use of our col­lab­or­a­tion tools (we now have a great video con­fer­en­cing sys­tem!) and the stronger integ­ra­tion with­in the team, are just a few of the vari­ous oppor­tun­it­ies that come with the cur­rent, seem­ingly adverse con­di­tions. We hope that all of our Peers will come through the pan­dem­ic without any ser­i­ous health restric­tions and go by the start-up motto: