SciSys acquired last year VCS by paying €16.64 million. Today I got to meet Prof. Dr. Klaus-G. Meng, the company’s single founder, that started VCS in 1981.
He told the initial history of VCS, how he started the company, etc. Basically he knew how to receive a signal from satellites and designed a receiver that was capable of monitoring the signal. Back then this was great technology. The European Space Agency was using paper prints that came out every X number of minutes so going to a system where they had live feedback of the signal on a TV was considered something very useful. His first client was precisely the Agency but soon after Lufthansa and other big companies were interested as well.
The first thing I asked was: wasn’t this easy enough to be done by other companies? Did you had strong competition? He said no because it was a niche market. The bigger companies were interested in bigger markets like medicine, etc.
He ended up doing a tour with us through the office, which was brilliant! The building used to be an abandoned school and maybe that’s why it is so functional inside. There are rooms for 1, 2 or 3 persons instead of an open-space, which reminded me more of a university environment than a software company.
