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 Darmstadt, Germany, and has offices worldwide. In 2023, Silver Lake and

Bain Capital Bain Capital, LP is an American Investment company, private investment firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts, with around $185 billion of assets under management. It specializes in private equity, venture capital, credit, p ...

made separate offers to buy the German company. In June, Software AG had most of its controlling interest acquired by Silver Lake, in a deal valued at 2.4 billion euros.

History

The company was founded in 1969 by six young employees at the consulting firm AIV (Institut für Angewandte Informationsverarbeitung). One of the founders was the mathematician Peter Schnell, who later became chairman of the board for many years. ADABAS was launched in 1971 as a high-performance transactional

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and an ...

. In 1979, Natural, a

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

application development English-like language, that was mainly developed by Peter Pagé, was launched. The company continued to open offices and subsidiaries in North America (1971), Japan (1974), UK (1977), France (1983), Spain (1984), Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, and Saudi Arabia (1985). By 1987, Software AG had around 500 employees, 12 subsidiaries in Europe and offices in more than 50 countries. In 1999, Software AG was listed on Frankfurt Stock Exchange and soon after the company released Tamino Information Server and Tamino XML Server. In January 2005, Software AG acquired Sabratec Ltd, a privately held legacy integration vendor headquartered in

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

. This was followed by the acquisition of its Israeli distributor SPL Software in March 2007 and the application modernization business of another Israeli company, Jacada in December 2007, which formed the basis for its

research and development Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in some countries as OKB, experiment and design, is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products. R&D constitutes the first stage ...

center in Israel. The company launched Centrasite SOA Governance platform in 2006 and with the $546M acquisition of U.S. rival webMethods in 2007 Software AG became active in the

enterprise service bus An enterprise service bus (ESB) implements a communication system between mutually interacting software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It represents a software architecture for distributed computing, and is a special vari ...

business process management Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to Business process discovery, discover, Business process modeling, model, Business analysis, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and Business process auto ...

and

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) product space. In July 2009, it announced a takeover offer for the Germany-based company IDS Scheer AG. Since February 2010, IDS Scheer is part of the Software AG Group. In October 2010, the company acquired New Jersey–based Data Foundations, a leading

master data management Master data management (MDM) is a discipline in which business and information technology collaborate to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency, and accountability of the enterprise's official shared master data assets. ...

provider. In May 2011, Software AG acquired Terracotta, Inc. and Metismo Ltd. Terracotta Inc is in the field of in-memory technology for high-performance applications and cloud services – especially the middleware platform WebMethods should benefit from this acquisition. In April 2012, Software AG (SAG) announced buying the British technology provider my-Channels. With it, Software AG gained in-house access to universal messaging technology that allowed the company to transfer their data streams quickly and safely to the cloud and mobile applications. In March 2013, SAG invested in Berlin-based company metaquark, which is specialized in mobile software – the aim is to jointly develop the webMethods Mobile Suite. In April, Software AG bought the US cloud platform provider LongJump, which offers modules and templates for building and running business applications in the public or private cloud settings. On June 13, 2013, it acquired alfabet AG, a software provider of

enterprise architecture Enterprise architecture (EA) is a business function concerned with the structures and behaviours of a business, especially business roles and processes that create and use business data. The international definition according to the Federation of ...

and IT portfolio management. Then SAG announced purchased the

Apama Apama (), sometimes known as Apama I or Apame I, was a Sogdian noblewoman and the wife of the first ruler of the Seleucid Empire, Seleucus I Nicator. They Susa weddings, married at Susa in 324 BC. According to Arrian, Apama was the daughter of t ...

Complex Event Processing platform of

Progress Software Progress Software Corporation is an American public company that produces software for creating and deploying business applications. Founded in Burlington, Massachusetts with offices in 16 countries, the company posted revenues of $531.3 mill ...

; the platform provides an environment for the design and operation of CEP applications providing tools and graphical analysis and test capabilities for analysts, developers and administrators. In August 2013, Software AG acquired JackBe to serve as the foundation for its Intelligent Business Operations Platform, which provides analytics and decision management for real-time applications. In December, Software AG invested in big data analytics company Datameer, which offers self-service Big Data Analytics and "to follow cutting edge technology trends". On March 27, 2017, SAG announced the acquisition of Cumulocity GmbH, based in Düsseldorf, Germany. On June 12, 2018, Software AG acquired the Belgian self-service analytics company, TrendMiner NV., a specialist in virtual data analysis for the manufacturing and process industry. In April 2023,

private equity Private equity (PE) is stock in a private company that does not offer stock to the general public; instead it is offered to specialized investment funds and limited partnerships that take an active role in the management and structuring of the co ...

firm Silver Lake agreed to buy the company for (billion). Silver Lake was outbid by Bain Capital in a non-binding counteroffer through its portfolio company

Rocket Software Rocket Software is a privately held software development firm founded in 1990. Using the IBM Z, IBM Power, and embedded database platforms, Rocket provides predictive analytics with deep data, develops AI and machine learning capabilities, and ...

, but Software AG's board and management supported the original offer citing its higher likelihood to go through and since it would remain an independent company. In June 2023, Silver Lake secured 63% of Software AG. Later that year, Software AG agreed to sell its StreamSets and webMethods platforms to

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

for $2.33 billion. During 2024, the company was reorganized from a stock corporation (AG, "Aktiengesellschaft") to a company with limited liability (GmbH, "Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung"). As a result, it changed its logo and other branding slightly, and now refers to itself as "Software AG, a Software GmbH Brand". Following the acquisition by Silver Lake, Software AG sold or divested the majority of its portfolio, including the sale of Alfabet and Cumulocity to an undisclosed buyer or buyers. In 2025, Software AG announced their intention to spin off the remaining two products, ARIS, and Adabas & Natural, as two separate businesses. The company also announced in January 2025 that Sanjay Brahmawar was stepping down as CEO and four executives had been appointed to lead Software AG's holding company, Software GmbH—Martin Biegel, Martin Clemm, Robin Colman, and Toktam Khatibzadeh.

Corruption allegations

In July 2017 allegations emerged in South Africa that Software AG made "kickback" payments by entering into questionable commission agreements with a Gupta-controlled company in the hope of securing lucrative state contracts. "Software AG aunchedan internal investigation after a media report alleged it had paid kickbacks as part of a wide-ranging South African scandal..."

Products

Software AG markets software products in technologies like

DBMS In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and ana ...

, application modernization, SOA, BPMS and ESB. Below are a few of their products on the market. * ADABAS – a high performance transactional

ARIS Aris or ARIS may refer to: People * Aris (surname) Given name * Aris Alexandrou, Greek writer * Aris Brimanis, ice hockey player * Aris Christofellis, Greek male soprano * Aris Gavelas, Greek sprinter * Aris Konstantinidis, Greek architect * ...

– acquired business process analysis platform. A free version is available as ARIS Express. * Centrasite – a flagship SOA governance application which provides

UDDI Web Services Discovery provides access to software systems over the Internet using standard protocols. In the most basic scenario there is a ''Web Service Provider'' that publishes a service and a ''Web Service Consumer'' that uses this service. ...

as well as governance * CONNX - Data Access, Data Movement (ETL), Streaming Analytics * Natural – an English-like

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 ...

for application development * NaturalONE –

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...

-based integrated development environment natural applications * Presto – Self-service, real-time data visualization and exploration tool combines data from different applications to create mashups, which can be displayed on any device. * TrendMiner – an industrial analytics platform. It offers self-service descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analytics on time-series data to find root causes and detect anomalies.

Former

* Tamino Information Server – Information server based on

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

for the storage, management and transfer of structured and

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically plain text, text-heavy, but may contain data such ...

, now called ''webMethods Tamino'' * Terracotta, Inc. – Company behind opensource Ehcache. Big memory, Quartz scheduler are their primary products. My-Channel's Nirvana messaging is now offered as Terracotta Universal Messaging. * webMethods – an ESB, API Management, BPMS, SOA enablement, MDM and B2B integration *Cumulocity IoT – an IoT product, providing hardware, Cloud and Edge Services as well as platforms adaptable to the Software AG Cloud *

– Platform for streaming analytics and intelligent automated action on fast-moving big data. Combines event processing, messaging, in-memory data management and visualization. * Alfabet – IT Planning, Portfolio Management, and Enterprise Architecture Software

Communities

Software AG uses two main customer communities: the ARIS Community, for the user group around ARIS, and the TECHcommunity, for collaboration around Adabas & Natural. In August 2021 Software AG introduced its virtual platform Software AG Groups where developers and customers can connect, collaborate, learn and share ideas. The Software AG University Relations Program organizes events and features free education packages that are self-explanatory, easy to use and made for remote learning. In an effort to build an academic user group, students gain free access to software, video tutorials and online training with the option to get certified upon completion. In 2022, Software AG partnered with the all electric ERA Championship as a title sponsor, bringing their technological expertise to the series, implementing solutions regarding data and utilizing the series as a platform for the company's ESG initiatives.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Software Ag Software AG Companies based in Hesse Software companies of Germany Software companies established in 1969 2023 mergers and acquisitions Darmstadt German companies established in 1969