Today, kgs is at the forefront of highly specialized Archive provider, has matured into a medium-sized innovation driver and operates worldwide. “We are proud of our history.

However, our strength lies in the fact that we have picked up today's pace in terms of high-tech and live the spirit of innovation and innovation every day,” says Winfried Althaus, managing director of kgs.From hidden star to fascinator. Management and all employees attach great importance to the stability of the products. This self-image has already accompanied company founders Reiner Kraus and Stefan Grau — but most other things have fundamentally changed over the course of 20 years. They assembled an SAP system on an old barebone PC and packaged it in a silver aluminum case paired with their own development SapaLink. With this, the two founders, such as sales agents or carpet sellers, traveled across all international trade fairs and presented their interface to DMS providers. As a supplier of connections to SAP, the founders quickly became very successful. SAP also made a name for itself: In 2005, KGS was given the status of being the only company besides SAP itself that was allowed to certify ArchiveLink (and then later also for ILM) on behalf of SAP.

A project at a large chemical company then catapulted KGS into today's primary business model: When a new storage technology was to be introduced, the idea matured that the entire overhead power of the DMS and archiving systems was not required at all. It was enough to add a lean management layer to SAP ArchiveLink that communicates directly with storage. On this basis, the KGS was archive developed for end customers — a real alternative for large DMS and ECM systems when the actual focus is on archiving. At the end of 2018, founders Kraus and Grau transferred their shares to the German investment company Maxburg Capital Partners GmbH.

Since then, Winfried Althaus has been the sole managing director, who put together a new six-person management team to expand the company - partly from his own ranks, partly new specialists have been recruited. “It is part of us to wake up again every morning with the aim of leaving old thinking patterns in order to come up with truly pioneering ideas,” says Johanna Zinn, Head of Marketing at KGS, explaining the company philosophy. With this claim, the company wants to fascinate its customers again and again and thus continue its own success story.A glimpse into the future“We continue to focus on performance and not on ourselves,” says Althaus. “For us, the secret lies in being virtually invisible — not as a company and contact person, of course, but as a product. If the archive runs so smoothly in the background that it doesn't attract attention, we've done everything right.

“KGS is taking this 20th anniversary as an opportunity to put the spotlight on even more than before. Not only is the anniversary being celebrated extensively with partners, customers and employees on several occasions — at the same time, a new look and feel, a new website and anniversary offers are being worked on, and the new product range “tia” - the intelligent archive - is being officially launched in spring 2020.