Mr Seitz, last year you wanted to raise your customers' awareness of standardization and automation under the banner of 'digital transformation'. What has happened in this regard in the last twelve months?

Sebastian Seitz: Our goal was and is to standardize the processes in control and switchgear manufacturing with regard to device data in order to subsequently make processes automatable. We are driving this topic forward significantly with the Data Standard based on eClass Advanced. Around 60 manufacturers with around 100,000 data records are now providing their device data in accordance with this new standard. And our customers are now making intensive use of this offer in the Data Portal.

The second point is AutomationML: we have now adapted many of the common PLC interfaces to this standard - for example for controllers from Beckhoff, Mitsubishi Electric, Phoenix Contact, Rockwell Automation and Siemens. We are currently in talks with companies such as B&R, Omron, Schneider Electric and WAGO.

You have decided not to explicitly force your customers into a cloud landscape - the added value should be convincing! Does the calculation work out?

Yes - it works and we will not change our strategy! Our cloud products eView and eBuild are well accepted and we already have around 30,000 registered users on Eplan ePulse. We have also been able to dispel many concerns about data security. I am very confident that we will be able to demonstrate the added value of cloud technology transparently, especially with our solutions.

You have announced that you will be realigning your software business with a subscription model for new licenses from August 2021. What is behind this?

On the one hand, we are making it easier for our customers to use our technology and giving them greater flexibility at attractive conditions. We are also responding to a wish expressed by many customers with regard to the use and billing of software. We are thus gearing our software business 100 percent towards the future.

You are entering SPSconnect with the slogan "What matters now!". What is important now?

We have to adapt quickly to the changing conditions. Many of our customers' employees are currently working from home. We have switched almost all of our services to online - and we have also found a flexible solution for license usage. In this case, the pandemic is driving digital services. In my view, we need to become less dependent on a purely physical presence - using highly digitalized channels. That is what is important today - so we can react quickly to changes.

The "Smart Engineering & Production" initiative launched years ago - together with Phoenix Contact and Rittal - is continuing. Can you give us some background to this?

Back at the Hannover Messe 2015, we jointly focused on the end-to-end digitalization of engineering and production processes in control and switchgear manufacturing with "Smart Engineering and Production". Today, these visions have become viable solutions that ensure one thing from engineering and production to operation and service: Absolute data consistency in digital processes based on a "single source of truth".