Florian Haidn initially worked in international sales at Kontron after graduating from high school with a degree in business administration. Most recently, he was responsible for European channel management and completed a part-time degree in business administration (VWA). He was then responsible for sales and marketing at Aaronn before becoming Managing Partner of the company together with his business partner Maik Schauer in 2018.

Mr. Haidn, you have been one of the Managing Directors of Aaronn Electronic since 2018. How did this come about and how has the company developed since you joined - especially during the pandemic?

Aaronn Electronic was founded in 1993 and has evolved over the years from a distributor to a one-stop store for embedded systems. As part of a management buyout, my long-time colleague Maik Schauer and I were able to acquire 100% of the shares from the founder and previous sole shareholder Klaus Lederer, who retired from the company in 2018 after 25 years.

Thanks to our flexibility, we were able to react quickly and purposefully to the challenges posed by the pandemic in order to provide our customers with the best possible support. For example, we allowed long-standing customers to postpone delivery dates at short notice due to the sudden drop in demand, even though we already had the goods in stock.

Aaronn offers customer-specific developments based on IPCs and modules from Advantech, Kontron, Seco and ADLINK. Why did you choose these partners?

Our technology partners are the leading companies in the field of embedded computer technology (ECT). Our aim is to select the products and services of our technology partners for our customers according to their requirements and - coupled with our activities as a system integrator - to develop the perfect solution. We advise our customers individually, independently and in partnership. At the same time, many customers involve us closely in their projects because they value our technical expertise, our many years of experience and our partner network in the field of ECT.

When do customers end up with you rather than directly with the module manufacturer and what advantages does this offer them?

Basically, there is no formula for when a customer ends up with the manufacturer and when with us. We support customers from different sectors and of different sizes: from engineering offices to global corporations.

With a manageable organization like ours, we can provide customers with individual and personal support. Our experience shows that many customers want individual adaptations even for large quantities and, in the best case, want to purchase pre-qualified "subsystems". This allows them to concentrate fully on their expertise. A specialized system integrator can usually do this better than a volume manufacturer.

Are you - like many other electronics companies - affected by supply bottlenecks? Are there ways in which you can position yourself differently for the future in order to avoid bottlenecks?

After we got through the pandemic well last year and up to the middle of this year under the circumstances, we are now also affected by supply bottlenecks. For this reason, it is important to communicate transparently and openly with customers and suppliers and to find individual solutions. It is clear that we are coping with the challenges much better with some customers: these are the ones with whom we have concluded long-term volume contracts and built up safety stocks and with whom we coordinate closely with regard to projects and forecasts.

We have been using a large part of our capital for years to expand our ability to deliver thanks to a very well-stocked warehouse - and we want to continue along this path. We also support our customers in taking a second-source strategy into account when designing in order to overcome short-term supply bottlenecks.

With COM-HPC, PICMG has defined and established a new computer module standard. What do you think about COM-HPC and are you already accepting projects with the new standard?

COM-HPC is currently in the process of supplementing the COM Express standard, which has been tried and tested for many years. We are seeing enormous interest from our customers in applications in the areas of IoT and artificial intelligence, but also in the use of 5G. What all these plans have in common is that much more data can be processed much faster - sometimes even in real time - than before.

For this reason, applications are moving closer to where the action is: they are migrating from the data center to the edge of the networks - in other words, to where embedded systems have long been at home. Their reliability, robustness and longevity are still required. However, users expect significantly higher performance and more data throughput - both of which COM-HPC combines. Many new applications in the automotive sector, in telecommunications or in industry will be possible thanks to the higher data rate and performance of COM-HPC.

Thank you very much for the interview Mr. Haidn.