Company of the International Business Centre of Madeira with innovative B2B software

With four offices spread over two continents and 40 professionals, 13 of them in Portugal, in the development centre it installed in Madeira, Connecting Software is an international company that operates in the segment of software integration, that is, the connection between various elements of software.

Thomas Berndorfer, the CEO of Austrian-German origin, launched Connecting Software in 2004 and the development centre of Madeira in 2017. He recalls that in the beginning he came to Madeira "because it was a fantastic place to live", but "he didn't have big plans for the regional section". However, in the first months, he acknowledges that, "we found highly motivated programmers, good professionals and favorable economic and political factors", which changed the company's plans for Madeira. Since the opening the regional office, the team has been growing constantly.

Currently with 13 professionals, Connecting Software intends to grow even more in Madeira, increasing its presence in the structure of the group that already has offices in Vienna, its headquarters, Slovakia and the United States of America. Besides being distributed around the world, Connecting Software's team is truly international by including professionals from 12 different countries.

Recently, the company has expanded its marketing department and customer service in its Madeira office, and is in the process of recruiting for these areas, both in the national and international markets, since it intends to attract international specialists to Madeira.

In Madeira, stresses the CEO, there is a positive situation for both the company and the Autonomous Region of Madeira, as there is a strong integration with the University of Madeira, with the Governments of Madeira and Portugal and there is also the integration in the International Business Centre of Madeira that presents tax advantages for the development of business on an international scale as Connecting Software does.

In close cooperation with the Slovak team, the Madeira team is creating integration and synchronization solutions for a variety of sectors and businesses. One of the most recent products, the OPC UA Connector, is a connector between production machines in a factory and standard business systems, i.e. a solution oriented to the so-called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). According to Thomas Berndorfer the OPC UA Connector "is the only solution in the world that allows machines and business systems to speak the same language", being accessible on any computer.

This ability to connect industrial solutions with business solutions through the same methodology, increasing productivity, makes Connecting Software one of the top companies in Europe in this area.

"We connect software more easily, faster and at a lower cost than the existing tools and thus help companies succeed in the challenges of digitalization and of being in an online world," says Berndorfer.

Connecting Software has an annual turnover of around 2 million euros and is a B2B oriented company. Most customers are government entities, large and small companies with integrated systems. It has customers such as the Parliament of Canada or government departments in countries such as New Zealand, Ireland, England, the Netherlands and the USA, in addition to large companies and brands such as Securitas, KTM, Compass Group, 21st Century Fox, Henkel or Hitachi.

The Connect Bridge platform, fully developed by Connecting Software, is the basis for the success of this company. This platform works as a translator, allowing the different commercial software solutions that already exist in a company to communicate with each other, facilitating business processes and making companies more productive. This platform supports most modern software such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Exchange or Salesforce, but also older software, 10, 20 or even 30 years old. By reducing the integration effort by at least 50% and saving up to 90% of the time it takes to get the integration up and running, the Connect Bridge platform remains very popular 7 years after its release.