Software AG
More info
- Creator
- Peter Schnell et al.
- Released
- 1969
- Owner
- Silver Lake (since 2023)
- Type
- Software company
- Website
- softwareag.com
Germany's second-largest software house for decades, built on a mainframe database still running in systems nobody dares touch.
Software AG was founded in Darmstadt in 1969, back when "software company" was still an odd business model. Its breakthrough was Adabas in 1971, a fast mainframe database built on inverted lists rather than relations, followed by Natural, a fourth-generation language for writing business applications against it. The pair ended up in government agencies, insurers and population registers around the world.
As SQL and relational databases took over, the company bought its way into integration instead: webMethods in 2007 and IDS Scheer, with its ARIS process tool, in 2009. Private equity firm Silver Lake took control in 2023 and then sold off pieces — including webMethods to IBM in 2024.