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Below is our recent interview with André Mindermann, CEO and Co-Founder at OTRS:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to OTRS?
A: Absolutely. The OTRS Group is one of the leading solution providers for process and communication management. Besides IT Service Management, our software suite provides structured communication and process management to customer service and IT security organizations. A recent study from OTRS showed that over 32 percent of employees need, on average, one hour a day to sort their email. To help address this, OTRS provides them with a ticket system that optimizes workflows; this allows team members to focus on their core tasks which increases overall productivity.
More than 170,000 companies worldwide use OTRS, including over 40 percent of the DAX 30 companies and customers like Porsche and Siemens. We are based near Frankfurt, Germany and currently have six subsidiaries around the world. Our US-based office is located in Cupertino, CA, and our team in that location works with customers like IBM and Marymount University.
We just celebrated our 15th anniversary by bringing together employees from all over the world to enjoy an evening of team-building and festivity aboard a ship as it floated down the Main River in Frankfurt.
Recommended: Q: You’ve recently published your 2017 annual report; could you tell us something more?
A: The annual report for 2017 offered proof that our growth strategy is working. Our sales revenues increased to EUR 7,645 thousand (approximately 8,886,500 US dollar) from EUR 7,254 thousand (approximately 8,432,000 US dollar) from the previous year. A high cash flow of EUR 1,703 thousand (approximately 1,979,000 US dollar) provides us a lot of flexibility. We are very optimistic about the financial outcome for fiscal year 2018 and expect a total revenue of more than EUR 8 million (approximately 9,3 million US dollar) – this is partly due to our increased emphasis on our cloud-based fully-managed solutions.
Q: Can you give us insights into your features?
A: OTRS offers a broad range of features that give companies the freedom to be successful because employees are able to concentrate on their core tasks while the administrative work moves forward on its own through workflow automation and process management. A few key features the system offers: Automation & Processes Management help to facilitate automated workflows through automatic notifications, individual tickets fields and process templates. The integrated Knowledge & Self Service features include FAQs, surveys and having all customer-related information easily accessible to agents. The Chat integration can help to have a fast and direct customer contact while Resource Management delivers a detailed overview of team workload, linked calendar entries and a common team calendar. However, our approach is to customize OTRS and its features to the specific needs of our customers. Feel free to see the full range of features here.
Q: How did you get to where you are today?
A: We have indeed gone through tremendous development, having started in 2000 as a purely open-source project and now employing more than 100 people worldwide and being listed on the German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt. There are a lot of ingredients for a successful enterprise, but when people ask me which is most important, I emphasize that employees are the most important asset. We believe that a job should help to develop the individual personality instead of subjugating it. If we are successful as a company, then this is exactly what we have achieved and we then benefit from the contribution that our employees can make through their personal development.
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Q: What does the future hold? Where is the company headed?
A: We just opened an office in Hungary´s capital, Budapest. Hungary is one of the fastest growing markets in Europe and our sales efforts there revealed the high business potential for this market. We are also planning to expand into further markets.
Besides that, we have recently shifted our product strategy to emphasize our cloud-based solution portfolio. The feedback of our customers and market surveys shows us how fast the demand for cloud services is growing so we are heading into the right direction by focusing on this increasing need.
We are also excited to launch several new products this year. The highlight will be OTRS 7 in November: The latest version of the time-honored service management software incorporates an entirely new UX for its customer portal, a shift that will continue to rollout to other areas of the product suite in the near future.
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