Peter Pagé (8 July 1939 – 14 November 2020) was a German software pioneer. He joined

Software AG Software GmbH, trading as Software AG, is a German multinational software corporation that develops enterprise software for business process management, integration, and big data analytics. Founded in 1969, the company is headquartered in Darmstad ...

Darmstadt Darmstadt () is a city in the States of Germany, state of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Frankfurt Rhine Main Area, Rhine-Main-Area (Frankfurt Metropolitan Region). Darmstadt has around 160,000 inhabitants, making it the ...

in 1971 as one of 6 employees and in 1975 became Vice President of Software AG. Page developed

NATURAL Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the laws, elements and phenomena of the physical world, including life. Although humans are part ...

as the first

fourth-generation programming language A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is a high-level programming language, high-level computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each ...

, which was instrumental in Software AG's success.

Life

Pagé was born in

Arolsen Bad Arolsen (, until 1997 Arolsen, being the German name for ''Spa'') is a small town in northern Hesse, Germany, in Waldeck-Frankenberg district. From 1655 until 1918 it served as the residence town of the Princes of Waldeck (state), Waldeck-Pyr ...

/ Waldeck. After graduating from a gymnasium in

Wiesbaden Wiesbaden (; ) is the capital of the German state of Hesse, and the second-largest Hessian city after Frankfurt am Main. With around 283,000 inhabitants, it is List of cities in Germany by population, Germany's 24th-largest city. Wiesbaden form ...

and studying

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

at the

Technische Universität Darmstadt The Technische Universität Darmstadt (official English name Technical University of Darmstadt, sometimes also referred to as Darmstadt University of Technology), commonly known as TU Darmstadt, is a research university in the city of Darmsta ...

, he worked from 1966 to 1970 as a hardware developer for process computers at

AEG The initials AEG are used for or may refer to: Common meanings * AEG (German company) ; AEG) was a German producer of electrical equipment. It was established in 1883 by Emil Rathenau as the ''Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft für angewandte El ...

Seligenstadt Seligenstadt is a town in the Offenbach district in the ''Regierungsbezirk'' of Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany. Seligenstadt is one of Germany's oldest towns and was already of great importance in Carolingian times. Geography Location Seligenstadt ...

, where, as project manager, he was responsible for the development and introduction of process computer systems, including the AEG 60-10 system. In 1971, Pagé joined the Institute for Applied Information Processing (AIV), from which Software AG later emerged. From 1975, together with Margit Neumann, he developed the innovative software development environment Natural as the first

. NATURAL revolutionized the creation of applications on mainframe computers with a completely interactive way of working. This has resulted in significant increases in productivity and shorter implementation times for application solutions. From 1977 Pagé as a member of the

Vorstand In German corporate governance, a ''Vorstand'' is the executive board of a corporation (public limited company). It is hierarchically subordinate to the supervisory board (''Aufsichtsrat''), as German company law imposes a two-tier board of d ...

executive board A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulations ...

, was responsible for marketing and sales as well as product development, where he largely built up the current product portfolio and adapted it to new market requirements in several cycles over many years. In 1990, he designed and implemented ''Entire Function Server Architecture'' (ENTIRE), the first

service-oriented architecture In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. SOA is a good choice for system integration. By consequence, it is also applied in the field ...

(SOA). Pagé left the company in 1992 after differences with Peter Schnell over Software AG's future strategy when the company had about 4.500 employees worldwide. In the following year, he received his

doctorate A doctorate (from Latin ''doctor'', meaning "teacher") or doctoral degree is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities and some other educational institutions, derived from the ancient formalism '' licentia docendi'' ("licence to teach ...

from TU Berlin. The title of his PhD thesis was "Object-Oriented Software in Commercial Applications". In 1994, Pagé joined Siemens Nixdorf AG as a member of the executive board and chief technology officer responsible for systems strategy and application software. In this function, he gave the company the "User Centered Computing"-architecture, which was in principle a service-oriented architecture (SOA), and reorganized their highly fragmented software offering.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Page, Peter 1939 births 2020 deaths Siemens people German computer scientists Businesspeople in information technology Technische Universität Darmstadt alumni