| Type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Business Process Management, Business Performance Management |
| Founded | 1984 |
| Founder(s) | Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer |
| Headquarters | Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Dr. Wolfram Jost Josef Bommersbach |
| Products | Enterprise Software |
| Revenue | 399 million euros (2008) |
| Employees | 2,760 employee |
| Parent | Software AG |
| Website | IDSScheer.com |
IDS Scheer develops, markets, and supports Business Process Management (BPM) software and is widely regarded as the founder of the BPM industry.[1][2][3] The company was established in 1984 by current supervisory board chairman and Chief Technology Advisor, August-Wilhelm Scheer as a spin-off from the Institute for Information Systems.[4][5][6] Based on Dr. Scheer’s early Y-Model, developed in the 1980s, IDS Scheer’s ARIS product and related consulting services is the heart of the company’s technology and revenue.[4][5] In 2009 it was acquired by Software AG.[7]
IDS Scheer has a dominant BPM market-share in Europe and is considered well-positioned in the US market based on its partnerships with Microsoft, SAP, HP, Oracle, IBM and TIBCO as well as consistent financial success and numerous favorable reports from Gartner, Forrester, and AMR Research. However, the company is less well-known in the US market, warranting some in the US to call IDS Scheer a “better kept secret.” [1][3][5][8][9][10][11][12]
The company holds the unique distinction of being embedded in the products of SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.[5][8][10][11][12] End-user markets for IDS Scheer include consumer packaged goods, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, papers, metals, retail and textile industries.[8]
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IDS Scheer was founded in 1984 to market the Y-Model reference framework developed by Dr. Scheer in the 1980s. The Y-Model helped users identify and classify processes and was originally the foundation of IDS Scheer’s products.[5][8] A special “Y” symbol is still in the company’s logo today as a representation of the Y-Model.
The company went IPO on the Frankfurt exchange in 1999. By the end of its first year as a public company, IDS Scheer had 87.1 million euro in annual revenue and had developed and sold the ARIS architecture it’s known for today.[13] The company grew rapidly from 87.1 to 220 million euro in revenue from 1999 to 2003 and up to nearly 400 million euro by 2008.[13][14][15] IDS Scheer acquired German-Swiss consulting firm Balink in 2004 and Russian consultancy Business Logic in January 2005.[8]
The company continues to fuel an aggressive expansion today, including the opening of offices in Australia, Croatia, and Shanghai from 2004-2007. By 2007, the company had almost 3,000 employees, over half of which were devoted solely to consulting.[8]
Software AG agreed to buy IDS Scheer for €487 million in July 2009.[16] The takeover was cleared by competition authorities in October 2009.[17]
The Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS) is a broad framework covering the strategy, design, implementation and control of business processes.[8] The framework was based on the work of IDS Scheer founder Dr. Scheer in the 1990s and is fundamental to the company’s ARIS platform. The ARIS framework is a generic, well-documented, methodology for business process modeling and lifecycle management.[18]
The ARIS platform is an integrated portfolio of software intended to facilitate the improvement of business methodologies on an ongoing basis.[6] It’s sold in four platform categories; the ARIS Strategy, Design, Implementation, and Controlling. ARIS is used to describe IDS Scheer’s suite of products, as well as the ARIS framework and ARIS Value Engineering methodology.
The firm was originally called “IDS Prof. Scheer Gesellschaft für integrierte Datenverarbeitungssysteme mbH” but was eventually shortened to IDS Scheer. IDS stands for Integrated Data-processing Systems.[8]