Industry Insights
An Update from TCG Process CEO Arnold von Bueren
Reflecting on my own deep roots in OCTO
Early Beginnings
My professional career began as a commercial clerk apprentice at Zurich Insurance, followed by what is now AXA Insurance. These initial years formed some foundational knowledge of how the insurance industry works, which continues to serve me to this day as despite all the innovations, the inner workings and demands placed on an insurers knowledge workers are largely very similar.
Subsequently I started working as a programmer – at that time, I had the impression that I was working on the forefront of people-friendly technology. I probably wasn’t the best business coder, but I took great pride in writing business applications that the customers appreciated (OS: RSTS/E and Basic programming language; ERP system for 40 concurrent users running on 512kb of core memory).
With my education, military service (compulsory in Switzerland!) and work, I never found the time to go abroad. So I decided to go to California to brush up on my English and searching for a lost love. I found her though the love never came back.
Arnold Von Bueren, during a Kofax outing as CEO, November 2002
My boss visited me in California, and we decided to set up a US post to look for hard- and software for the Swiss market, which started with a relationship with Fujitsu…eventually leading us into capture.
First Glimpse of No/Low Code
At the time I had a meeting with Vinod Koshlal, young co-founder at Sun Microsystems – I distinctly remember him announcing that they would be going to be a billion-dollar company with their own distribution. He was right (even though 1 billion sounded outrageously big at that time).
We looked at software that claimed to do away with programming as we knew. By parametrizing modules, simple applications could be built. Too simple for practical use, but I had my first encounter with No Code/Low Code.
After three years in the US, I returned to Switzerland. The Fujitsu relationship continued developing and a large order for the Swiss census allowed us to expand into distribution around capture in Switzerland and other European countries. For a short while we also distributed ‘Software through Pictures’ (StP), a multi-user software development to speed up the production of high-quality code. With StP I encountered software that for the first time was open to integrate 3rd party modules (almost heresy at that time).
Acquisitions Leading to Opportunity
We eventually listed this business on the London Stock Exchange, paving the way for the acquisition of one of our key suppliers, Kofax, in 2000. I became CEO at Kofax, and during my tenure I learned a lot about producing a standardized software product and how to sell it through an international reseller channel.
Eventually I decided to take the acquisition plunge myself and bought a small software company called TCG Informatik AG. TCG’s capabilities of automatically reading invoices had impressed me, and I finally arrived in the world of intelligent document processing.
I soon found out that the software foundation of TCG at the time was somewhat chaotic. Each install became its own non-standardized version- a potential nightmare for support and upgrade actions.
Building the Foundation
Over the next few years, we decomposed the old ‘spaghetti’ code, and a change in strategic direction meant that we had the opportunity to fully write our own process platform.
So that’s what we did, giving ourselves a lot of time to get the base architecture right. We wanted to avoid known past limitations, implement our vision of a modern, scalable process platform and standardize on the latest software tools and methods. Thus, our old platform Primus - the underlying power of DocProStar - was born.
The beginnings of OCTO
Over the last 8 years we have built Primus and brought lots of additional power into our product, often upon requests from our valued customers who took us wider and deeper into process automation, bringing us to our announcement today introducing OCTO (Latin: eight, reflecting its 8 major capabilities).
"OCTO is built on modern standards and technology, but it is steeped in valuable experiences that make a good product great."
There are lots of personal experiences reflected in OCTO. The work as an insurance knowledge worker, years as a software engineer writing (black box) code. The recognition that transparency and no code/ low code and openness to 3rd party technologies will lead to a more modern product. And not the least: two decades of exposure with process-based software and process automation itself.
And that’s just me. Of course, there are our product and development teams, our partners and associates who have contributed years and decades of experience as well.
I am proud of what we have brought to life with OCTO. Built on modern standards and technology, OCTO is steeped in valuable experiences that make a good product great. I look forward to seeing it help and be loved by our customers and partners.
