The Cloud is his World: Enterprise in Aargau


Monday, January 07, 2013 by Aargau Services

He studied IT at the University of Applied Sciences in Windisch and already had ten employees when he graduated. Manuel Grenacher is now CEO of coresystems ag and develops business apps at his Windisch-based company, with more than 120 employees.

Your company motto is "We love the Cloud". Is that also the concept of coresystems ag?

Definitely. We are the leading global provider of business apps. Our apps make companies more efficient. For example, sales representatives making a client visit can access all necessary data via iPhone, iPad or notebook at any time and also submit their reports immediately.

How many customers do you have, and who are your customers?

Around 75,000 people around the world currently use one of our products. Our customer portfolio includes numerous small, medium and large companies from various areas of the industry and service sector.

Our range includes products from coresuite, which create the connection from SAP and ERP master data to mobile devices and are responsible for synchronization in the cloud. Or the product mila, an electronic assistant for microenterprises with which administrative tasks are reduced to a minimum. We launched mila in October 2012 and envisage great potential in India and Asia.

The company is only ten years old and already has global operations.

As the result of constant growth, we now have locations in Freiburg im Breisgau, London, New York and Shanghai, as well as support centres in Galway and Copenhagen. In addition, we have a development centre in Romania.

The headquarters and the majority of employees - around 80 of them - are located in Windisch. Why?

I studied IT at the University of Applied Sciences in Windisch. To finance my studies, I was already creating web solutions and trading in computers. At the end of my course of study, I had ten employees. We moved into rented accommodation at the Windisch Technopark®. The company now rents the entire building.

You have to recruit employees from abroad. Is it not a problem to attract them to Windisch?

Wages in Switzerland are high by international standards. That is an advantage when recruiting. It is also fairly easy to find an apartment here in Windisch - certainly when compared with Zurich.

What is the secret of your success?

The employees. The IT industry is very fast-moving. Trends must be recognised rapidly. We are currently in the process of developing software which looks for business-relevant information from the social media and forwards it to our customers.

So when someone posts that his heating has broken down, it would make sense for this information to go to the local heating specialist. I certainly reflect every morning on how I can further the company, but we need to make use of the ideas of all employees. We are all part of a team, and every single member from the shareholders to the youngest employees has a strong commitment to the company. That is why each of us has to organise or do something which benefits the team once a year.